Paritioning advice on XP machine for Red Hat and SuSe
 

Okay I have a Celeron 1 Gigahertz with 384 Megs RAM and a 20 GIG Hard Drive and a 535MB HD. Right now it is all a gigantic XP NTFS partition (why do stores do this? i hate it). About 10 Gigs is USED by XP for files and programs and the like. I want to keep another 3 Gigs open for XP so 13 GIGS for XP this leaves me 7 Gigs for Linux.

I want SuSe 9.0 and Red Penguin 9.0 (same as red hat just different company) I know this is redundant probably but I want to try two different flavors and i payed for both so i wanna use both.

First off can the two share a swap partition? If so does it really need to be 2X 384? that seems kinda huge to me. Should the swap partition(s) be the entire 535 MB HD to make easier access time? Or should i put a SuSe or RedHat partition on there for the dual boot. (i hear XP is nasty if u mess with the MBR). If it should be something other than a swap partition what should it be?

I am going to install SuSe first to use its NTFS resizer.

here is what i am proposing

20 GIG drive = /dev/hda
535MB drive = /dev/hdd

size format location OS
13 GIG NTFS /dev/hda1 XP (can SuSe convert to FAT32 from NTFS)
4 GIG ext? /dev/hda2 SuSe (I plan to use SuSe the most)
3 GIG ext? /dev/hda3 Red Penguin (red hat)
535MB swap /dev/hdd1 Swap for Red Penguin and SuSe

does this sound good? what is a good opensource free defragger to lessen the chance of loosing NTFS XP data? is the windows defrag good enough? or does SuSe do it for u?

should i use the SuSe boot loader or the Red Penguin? (i am installing SuSe first remember). Am i right with the swap parition? is this all the partitions I need? sorry if im asking dumb questions or babbling.:newbie:

"First off can the two share a swap partition?"
Yes.

"If so does it really need to be 2X 384? that seems kinda huge to me."

Setting swap space to twice memory size is simply conventional wisdom. To figure how much swap space you will actually use is so complicated that nobody can answer the question with anything more than a rough guess. My rough guess is that you could set it to 512M and never have anything to worry about.

"Should the swap partition(s) be the entire 535 MB HD to make easier access time?"

With 384M you have enough memory that you will swap very little if at all. So optimizing swap performance is a waste of effort for you.

"(i hear XP is nasty if u mess with the MBR)."

Yes. So the usual way around this problem is to install XP first and let it think it has the MBR to itself. Then install a Linux distribution and tell the Linux installer to dual boot Linux and XP and it will set up the bootloader chain so that XP works OK. I suggest that you install XP first. Then install SuSE and tell SuSE to dual boot. Then install Red Penguin and tell Red Penguin not to install any bootloader. Then boot into SuSE and change the SuSE bootloader from dual boot to triple boot.

" what is a good opensource free defragger to lessen the chance of loosing NTFS XP data? is the windows defrag good enough? or does SuSe do it for u?"

Somebody else will have to answer this question. My Windows experience ended with Windows 95.

"should i use the SuSe boot loader or the Red Penguin? (i am installing SuSe first remember)."

SuSE

"Am i right with the swap parition?"

535M is fine.

" is this all the partitions I need?"

I suggest that you also create a vfat partition. Linux will not write to a NTFS partition so you could use a vfat partition to hold data that you want to share between XP and Linux.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

I just did this yesterday with XP and aside from my own ignorance causing a few minor problems went off quite well.
Repartioned everything with Partition Magic and installed Red Hat. Put the Bootloader on the /boot partion. I panicked when I couldn't get into XP any longer (from choosing the Add location option during LILO install and pointing it to the XP drive which is NTFS) so did a complete reinstall of Red Hat this time putting LILO on the MBR and had the same problem. what I had forgotten the first time I did this was that I had already set up a Dual Boot with DOS and XP. When I tried to boot into DOS then it brought up the DOS/XP dual options and allowed me to get back into XP no problem. I now suspect that if I had just tried booting into DOS on the first install I wouldn't have had any problems at all.

Hope this helps, and if it was a complete waste of space I apologize.