I have just signed up for Redhat. I have purchased an new 120GB harddrive for Dell Inspiron laptop with 512 mb ram.

I have created a partition C: of 100mb and will format in fat32. This will be for bootloader ect.

The second partition will be D: and will be 10gb and will install XP there.

After that install I will then use Redhat and let Druid select install from there.

Does this sound reasonable? Any other recommendations?

I want to share documents between Linux and XP. Should I have a separate partition in fat32 for "my documents" and put all documents there? Or does is matter if documents are stored in the XP partition?

Thanks,

Ken

You will get a MINIMUM of one opinion per person...

Mine:
No need for separate /boot
One NFTS partition for Windows 10-15GB
One ext3 partition for Linux ~10GB
Linux swap 1GB
<extended partition>
logical partitions:
--1 ext3 for shared data---maybe 60GB
--empty (unpartitioned) space for future additions)
Access the shared data from Windows using the ext2fsd driver.

I typically preferred a shared fat32 partition for documents and anything you want to use in both OS's.

What boot loader are you planning on using? If you're going to just use grub, then the 100MB partition should be ext3, not fat32 and then just direct RH to install /boot on that partition and grub to the MBR. If you're using a 3rd party bootloader (SBM, XOSL, etc) then they'll probably tell you what to format that as.

EDIT: @pixellany -- I like to have a separate boot partition on dual boot machines, because then I can nuke the linux install for a different distro and XP will still be able to boot because grub's files are in that /boot partition.

If this is your first time using linux I would keep the setup simple as far as partitions go. Something like this.

Put in your win-xp disk and make maybe a 20GB partition and install XP to that. That partition will be your C: drive for windows, make it a NTFS partition. Now with the free space you can make a different partition for linux. I would also make one partition that both windows and linux can use.

20GB primary partition for windows --> do this one first
20GB primary partition for linux
512mb logical partition for swap

and then make one more partition FAT32 maybe that both windows and linux can use.

Sounds great. One question: I thought the linux bootloader had to be in first 1032 cylinders.l..first 8.3gb? Is that not necessary now?

Thanks for the responses.

Ken

The boot loader: ie. GRUB or LILO, gets set in the Master Boot Record. This will redirect the boot to wherever Linux starts. My Linux partition starts at the 100GB cylinder on my machine.

If you expect you will need to reinstall Windows one day, better install grub in the boot record of GNU/Linux partition and use Windows boot manager to boot GNU/Linux.