how to partition for triple boot

annehoog · 02-27-2003, 08:08 AM

Hi!

I now have a working system with XP on hda and RH on hdb.
These are two separate hdd's with only the necessary boot and swap partitions and with grub in the mbr.

Now I've decided to give either slack or debian a go (haven't decided which one yet) and I want to free up some space for it.

Thing is that I have never partitioned manually in my life, so I'm quite clueless in the territory.

So what would be best:
put it on the linux drive
(can I leave RH intact and is it then possible to share swap and /home? How much can you share anyway??)

Put it on the XP drive
How to do this and can I do it leaving everything (XP and grub) intact?

Thanxxx
Anne

bulliver · 02-27-2003, 03:17 PM

I would put the two linux's together. It will probably save trouble in the long run. Do you have free space on any of your HDD's? If not you need to resize some partitions which can be tricky.

You can totally share a swap or home partition. Just don't create them when installing the second distro, then manually edit your /etc/fstab after your first boot.

I have three distro's on one HDD that share the same swap partition, as well as another partition that has all my oggs, which gets mounted at boot no matter which distro I happen to be using. Very convenient.

annehoog · 03-03-2003, 02:12 AM

I'm afraid I will have to repartition since I just let RH partition the HDD (30 gb) automatically.
Any ideas on how and with which program I could do that easiest?

Anne

twan · 03-03-2003, 09:33 AM

i advice you partition magic

annehoog · 03-03-2003, 09:35 AM

I've also googles for it and found GNU parted which is freely available, any experiences with that?

Anne

MasterC · 03-03-2003, 10:05 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by twan
i advice you partition magic

Nothing directed at you personally...

I'd rather chew my arm off than use that. There has been FAR too many threads on people jackin up partitions using that for linux tasks. Parted is a free Gnu tool for resizing linux partitions, it works great. Linux's fdisk is also a great tool along with cfdisk, so I'd much rather use parted, followed with a cfdisk over PM any day of the week and twice on Sunday

Cool

Fingel · 03-03-2003, 07:56 PM

I'm having the almost EXACT problem, I have RH 8 on hdb and Win XP on hda and I want to free space up on hdb(80gigs) the only problem is that I didnt really know what I was doing when I installed RH, so I let it take up the whole drive.I'm going to download QTParted, but I too, have no I dea what to do. I'm not really too worried about sharing any partitions, maybe the home partition if its not that complicated. Anyway, Should I just reduce the size of every partition by half? That sounds too easy, that probably wont be the case with the Swap partition. If anyone has ever done this beofre it would be nice to hear some advice, I havent found any documentation on QTparted's website. Thanks

MasterC · 03-03-2003, 08:53 PM

It's really straight forward (QTparted I'm guessing is going to be a graphical front end for GNU parted). I'd find the largest partition and see if you can shrink that one down. Give yourself about 4GB's overall, then install to that. The swap don't worry about, you can use it in both distros (and all linux distros).

Cool

Fingel · 03-03-2003, 09:56 PM

I'd rather make my drive 50/50 Rh 40gigs and debian 40gigs. Or rather, I'd make rh 30gigs and debain 30 gigs, so maybe I'l try slackware or something. So i shoudlent touch the swap? Will I share it or just make another? Is it hard to share partitions? If im going to share the swap I might as well share the home, too.

Fingel · 03-03-2003, 10:50 PM

ok Im having a hard time installing QTparted, but I have parted installed. Is it hard without the GUI? Should I just completely remove RH and install debian on only 30 gigs? I dont really have anything on RH, so its no loss. Any music files are already on CD

MasterC · 03-03-2003, 11:46 PM

If nothing lossed, I would. Now you have an idea of how you partitions hopefully, and can partition your space a bit better. 30GB for a single distro is ALOT of space. 4GB per distro is about all you really need. The rest is hopefully shared data such as music/movies/programs and so on. These can be on "shared" partitions mounted up at /mnt/shared and such (I personally don't suggest sharing /home since it's where the program specific files are kept). You could probably increase the 4 to 6GB and be comfy. So, make 3 partitions at 6GB a pop. These will be your / partitions for each distro. Then, create a seperate /boot partition if you so desire, no need for anything larger than about 50mb for that (you could go for a GB if you wanted, but that's about 20 times overkill) and some shared mount points, at what, around 10 or 20GB a pop depending on your thoughts/needs/desires. A seperate /var and /usr are sometimes suggested, however I don't do the seperate /usr as that's what my 6GB of space on / are for. I do however use a seperate /var for my server distro (slack for me) since that's where I host some of my FTP/HTTP files from.

What you don't need seperate partitions for (someone jump in if you find this incorrect) are /opt /sbin /root /etc (maybe for backup puposes the /etc but I'd say nah) you also don't need a seperate /dev /mnt /proc or /lib /tmp is a mixed issue. You could have it seperate, but why? I'd include that in the list of things not needing a seperate partition. From there, you decide from the rest of the required mount points what your needs are. Just for kicks, here's my setup:

Code:

/dev/hdb1        /                ext3        defaults                  1   1
/dev/hda5        /Mandy           ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hda6        /home            ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hdg2        /var             ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hda7        /mnt/lfs         ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hdb5        /empty           ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hdb7        /empty/home      ext3        defaults                  1   2
/dev/hda1        /mnt/winbloze    vfat        noauto,users              1   0
/dev/hdb6        /mnt/fat32       vfat        umask=000,auto,users,rw   1   0
/dev/hdg1        /mnt/storage     ext3        defaults                  1   0
/dev/cdrom       /mnt/cdrom       iso9660     noauto,users,ro           0   0
/dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto        noauto,owner              0   0
none             /dev/pts         devpts      gid=5,mode=620            0   0
none             /proc            proc        defaults                  0   0
/dev/sda1        /mnt/sony        vfat        umask=222,auto,users,ro   0   0
#/dev/scd0       /mnt/cdrom       auto        ro,noauto,user,exec       0   0
#/dev/scd1       /dev/scd1        auto        ro,noauto,user,exec       0   0
bash-2.05a$

At this much per:
bash-2.05a$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 6.0G 2.2G 3.5G 38% /
/dev/hda5 6.3G 3.4G 2.5G 57% /Mandy
/dev/hda6 10G 2.6G 7.1G 27% /home
/dev/hdg2 19G 91M 18G 1% /var
/dev/hda7 12G 1.2G 10G 10% /mnt/lfs
/dev/hdb5 4.9G 3.0G 1.7G 64% /empty
/dev/hdb7 2.9G 183M 2.7G 7% /empty/home
/dev/hdb6 4.9G 1.7G 3.3G 33% /mnt/fat32
/dev/hdg1 28G 23G 5.6G 80% /mnt/storage
/dev/cdrom 657M 658M 0 100% /mnt/cdrom
[/code]
I'm not sure if that show everything, but at least you can get an idea of how I've got mine setup.

Cool

annehoog · 03-04-2003, 03:03 AM

what about diskdrake?

on it's homepage it says:
resize fat partitions
resize partitions (when not caring loosing its data)

Does that mean that it does resive, but you loose your data????

I've seen horrible stories about compiling QTparted (which now seams to be the best choice) has anyone here had any luck compiling it?

Anne

MasterC · 03-04-2003, 03:11 AM

diskdrake can resize without losing data, but it's taking a bigger risk than using parted AFAIK. I've successfully done it with diskdrake, but my drive wasn't nearly full. If you are willing to try it, good luck. Parted really isn't that bad via the CLI. Might be worth a shot.

Cool

annehoog · 03-04-2003, 03:15 AM

Ok, I'll try to get my hands on a good how to for it.

Anne

Fingel · 03-04-2003, 08:44 AM

I was just trying to compile QTParted, I had no luck. I'll try out disk drake, thats not for mandrake is it?