Ok, I'm going to be getting my new 250GB Sata150 Maxtor HD drive tomorrow and I need to know how you guys would recommend I set things up. I'm going to keep my two PATA drives and use them both (20GB each) as hard drives to test and use different installations on. For now, I want to have a partition on the SATA drive with PCLOS, then I'll install WindowsXP onto the SATA drive, a swap partition, and then the rest of it will be FAT32 for data storage. My question is...how do I do this. 10GB Reiserfs for the linux partition on the SATA, 15GB for the Windows partition (for games and such), 1GB swap partition (can I point the linux distro's from the other drives to the same 1GB swap partition on the serial drive?). Would that be fine?

I'm gonna really need to figure out how to use LILO to point to these different drives and installations.

If you already have a swap in any of the Pata then you do not need further swap. Linux installer will find it and knows how to use it because a swap is always partition type 82.

You can do what you wish to do with any installed Linux ( or from a booted up CD) to partition the new disk. Just use cfdisk in terminal mode. You need to make the XP partition type 7 for NTFS and it must be a primary partition which you should make it active (or bootable) for the XP installation. Linux doesn't use the bootable flag so it will not be affected as it can be booted from any logical partition as well as primary parition.

If your installed Linux has a kernel older like 2.4 then it may not be able to recognise a Sata and so partitioning will not be possible. In which case use a Live CD.

We can advise you on how to change Lilo to multi boot. Depending on the Lilo version it can boot a maximum of 27 images.

To find out if your Linux capable of recognising a Sata just type in terminal mode
and all your disks and partitions will be displayed. The "l" in the above is a small "L".

Another thing I would mention on such a big disk is to consider whether you might want to run *BSD in the future. If so, reserve a primary partition for *BSD.

From reading the posts, 1G is a very big swap. Most of the guys here report swap never being used.

Although a swap is not always used 100% by some distro, especially with plenty of memory, it is essential for some distro installation.

I recommend the swap be created in a size easily remembered to assisted the reconstruction of the partition table if it get damaged.

Yeah, I just go with 1GB. I need to upgrade to more memory (512 doesn't cut it these days I guess), but I doubt I will ever use that much. I don't think that with 250GB I need to worry about space for a while.

I have the latest version of Ubuntu (Breezy I think?), and I was planning on downloading the latest version of Debian, that's Sarge isn't it? Those would be past v2.4 right? PCLOS is v2.6 so it is alright. And until I can figure out my wireless card issue, I won't be getting rid of PCLOS (its my primary OS at the moment, haven't used Windows in weeks.)

I'm sure I'll be back with more questions later when I get the disk and start working on getting things moved around.