I have used Norton Partition Magic to partition my 80Gb HDD with the first 40 or so Gb used by windows 98,. The next part is set up as the swap file for RH9 and the remainder is ext 3 ready to receive the RH9. Nortons Boot Magic is the current bootloader and I would like to continue to use it if I can. 1) Do I need to make a /boot partition and if so how big should it be? The documentation is not clear on this in a dual boot scenario. 2) Should I instal GRUB or LILO and where should it be installed in a dual boot system? Thanks everyone...

Hi,

You could have done the partitioning with fdisk itself.....its pretty simple ......and you can always make a few partitions of Win 98 available for LINUX, because linux detects and accepts FAT partitions, but windows does not detect ext3 (thats why linux has to be installed after windows !!)....

As far as partitioning is concerned, the following partitions are minimal and extremely important :

1. The / partition (root partition);
2. Swap partition (usually twice the size of your RAM);
3. /boot partition; (containing the boot programs);
4. /usr partition or /opt partition (This is where all applications are usually installed......make sure that you allocate a considerable porttion of your HD to this partition)
5. /var partition (This is used to keep logs of all activities taking place in your box).

Other partitions include /tmp (temporary), /usr/local etc .....


If you are going by a GUI based install, installing a grub and boot loader is pretty simple........you have to choose your boot loader, and the rest of it is taken care of by the system itself ....ofcourse, it installs the bootloader in /boot, /boot/grub/grub.conf being the configuration file.

Hope this answers.

Regards.

Meaning no disrespect to Vijayasarathy, but if you are really, Really new to linux, for this install, what I would do -- remembering being that new myself! -- is:

1) you say 80GBDrive with first ~40GB as Win, ok, done.
1b) do NOT use PM to create Lin-parts; I keep getting failures from that with many *each* of: distro, drive, BIOS, &&&&&c -- Leave other ~40GB NOT allocated at this point.

2) insert RH media and boot therefrom. May need to choose 'advanced' or some such to get to appropriate partitioning options for the following.

3) when asked partitioning, only in unused space!, create:
--a) ~100MB = /boot (at least 20M, more is for "maybe-later" -- this part should be PRIMARY, and this is where GRUB goes (or lilo if you insist),

--b) at least 128MB = swap, more if needed up to ~2GB; 2xRam is good thumbrule -- this part should be *logical*,

--c) all remaining as / -- this part should be *logical*.

4) Reboot into Win & use the BM-setup to find your new /boot part and add it to your boot-list. This is *exactly* how my computer boots; works fine except needing one extra <enter> to boot quickly... *Big* *Whoop!*.

5) NOW reboot into rh9 & finish the setup, customizing, etc, etc, etc...

-----------............

I have my-home & PRO-servers using this setup happily; just use
df -h
and
du -csh /*
every so often. (Check manpages or "info du", etc.).

The reason for lots of parts if to keep any one thing from using up the whole drive. The other reason is that **sometimes** you get a problem on one part but still can boot, since it is a 'data' part -- better hardware now makes this even ess likely than previously, bu it *is* still true -- your choice, but the trio lets you learn where ***YOU*** will actually use up space.

This way, if you start getting low on space, but catch this in time with du & df, the computer doesn't bark at you and stop (something), you can know roughly where it went and clean it up. Hints: if /home is the fatty, do (as root):
cd /home
du -csh *
If DooFus is now the fatty:
cd DooFus
du -csh *
if pictures is now the fatty, you know what to do.

Anyway, once you find *the* fatty, you can then figure what to do with the <stuff>, maybe with help. Once you are in the fat dir, use:
mc
to look stuff over, or maybe your favorite gui-filebrowser.
Check "man mc" &/or "info mc" also, and its going to be big. "mc" is *always* worth knowing! (But doesn't *alyaws* look right in a gui-console window -- better from the 'true' (v)tty text-console.)

Best!,