alright im about to put a new system together and setup a raid 1 system. I have two 160 gb hd for raid 1. I want to do a dual boot with xp pro and some linux distro, not sure which one yet though. Anywayz i need to install xp pro on the first half of the hard drive and the other half linux. My question is can I partition the linux os in the windows setup or should i put xp pro on the wholesystem as one partition and then install linux and split the windows partition and make the other half into the linux os? Any suggestions?

You would be better off leaving a part of the disk for linux. Select say, 70% for XP and leave the balance 30% unformatted for linux to install.

Ok. Well I decided to go without the raid1 setup and have decided to use my two 160 gb hd's for xp and either knoppix or slackware10. I am going to do a install for knoppix and not run it from cd. I am going to be using the linux os for many things. Database server, web server, video and music d/l, secuirty tools "small projects", and the possibilty of adding more servers in the future.

This is what I want my setup to be:

HD1 160 gb -> XP PRO
HD2 160 gb -> LINUX OS
3.06 ht processor
2 gb memory

How should I setup my partitions in linux to support what I will be using the system for. ie. servers, files, etc. as far as /, /boot, /var, /usr, /swap, and /home go?

Any help would be appreciated.

the sizes of those partitions in linux depends on all sorts of things like amount of traffic, number of users, etc...

if there are not going to be a load of users then /home doesn't need it's own partition and /usr probably doesn't either (the only reason to give /usr it's own partition is to make it read only i guess?).

/var can have it's own partition so the servers have space to write their logs and mail can be spooled, etc.. that's very important in a production setting.

the swap partition should be big because your main memory is big - some people would say 4GB swap space for 2gb of memory. linux 2.2 kernels and later support up to 4 gb of swap.

if your'e unsure how big to make the partitions and this isn't some production server for a company or something like that then it's better to have fewer partitions because that gives you more flexibility but with a 160 gb drive you probably have a lot of room to overestimate each partition size and be ok.

I am going to be the only user on the system, so I really dont need to have a /home directory. As far as /var is concerned is about 20 gb enough for storage?

When I set up the system during setup what order should the dir be in. ie / ,/boot, /var, etc

Can you recommend a size for /, /boot, /usr, and /var?

Thank You

Well, you should have a /home directory even if you're the only user. you shouldn't be logging on as root for security reasons so at least one user's directory in /home is good practice.

/boot doesn't need to be big at all - on my system it's just over 5 MB so make it larger than that in case your distro is slightly different or in case you need a initrd image because you're using a SCSI drive etc.. i can't imagine it would ever be bigger than 25 MB and probably 10 MB is fine.

I would make 4 GB of swap space - since you have 160GB disk and 2GB of RAM i don't see that as overkill

/var is up to you - I have no idea what kind of traffic you'll have and thus i don't know how big the logs you'll be generating will be.

the rest can just go in / - there's no need to separate out /usr

good luck