I am helping a friend set up a computer. Think of it as having a brand new 160GB hard drive, and the intent is to boot it up, and have lilo offer a choice between booting windows xp (I don't like it any more than you do) or linux.

Here was my idea for a partitioning scheme:

/dev/hda1 Windows Root Partition (NTFS)
/dev/hda2 Linux swap partition
/dev/hda3 NTFS windows misc
/dev/hda4 Slack

Should I do the partitioning in FDISK?

From what I have read online, what a lot of folks do is establish the first partition with the windows installer, and install windows. Then boot slackware, and finish the rest of it.

Since my third primary disk is going to be a windows volume, how do I get windows to realize that it is there?

Is there a certain way that my drives must be formatted? I figured I would format the windows drives in NTFS, and would do the linux root drive as ext3. Will this cause any problems?

The easiest way to do this is:

with the slack CD make the partitions by Using cfdisk or fdisk, U may want to let the first partition for WinXp. i recommend U something like

/dev/hda1 Windows Root Partition NTFS 30 GB
/dev/hda2 Share Partition 1 Fat32 30 GB
/dev/hda3 Share Partition 2 Fat32 30 GB

/dev/hda4 Extended Partition 70 GB

/dev/hda5 Linux Swap (Logical) SWAP 2-4 GB
/dev/hda6 Homes (Logical) REISER 30 GB
/dev/hda7 Root (/) (Logical) REISER 10-15 GB (This must be more than enough)

/dev/hda8 I Dont know, I would let it free for installing other operating systems.



Now I've partitioned I would install WinXP

and then Slack


Good Luck!

Sorry, I almost forget.


Once U have installed winXp and slack U should format the share partitions as fat IN WINDOWS. By doing this U can share files between Windows and Linux easilly

Unless you really need the special features of NTFS (e.g. files bigger than 2GB), use FAT32 instead.

NTFS is poorly supported by Linux.

Why on earth would you want two shared partitions?

Me, I would set up the partitioning like this:

/dev/hda1 NTFS 60GB (Windows. Adjust the size if you think you'll need it, but that should be enough to install most any game you play with any regularity. My own Windows partition is only 50GB)
/dev/hda2 FAT32 50GB (shared between Win/Lin. Keep your MP3's, work files, and anything else you want to have in both systems here)
/dev/hda3 ReiserFS 15GB (mounted as /)
/dev/hda4 ReiserFS 30GB (mounted as /home)
/dev/hda5 Linux Swap 2GB
/dev/hda6 NTFS 3GB (Windows swap; don't use it for anything else, and disable swap on the other partitions.)

I'd grow/shrink the linux swap size (taking from /home) to suit your needs. If you're in a system with a lot of physical memory, you may not even need any linux swap at all. My own desktop, for example:
I've actually got 1GB of physical memory, but Linux isn't even close to using all of it. It never gets close, so I personally have absolutely no need for a swap partition on this system. If you're running without a whole lot of physical memory (say 512MB or less), then throw in some swap. Maybe 1GB or two. You likely won't need more than about 1gb of total addressable memory for a long time, since Linux is much more conservative about how it treats memory than Windows.



Once you've set up the partitioning, install Windows. Linux comes second, because it plays friendly. After getting Windows up and running, you might consider creating a compressed image of the Windows base installation on one of the other partitions. There's actually a 1.7GB hard drive in my computer with a hidden partition that I use for that, because Windows XP is a bitch to install, and manages to get itself corrupted with bothersome regularity. Personally, I'm using BootIt NG for that, but Linux has tools that are capable of doing it, too. 1.4GB is enough space to store an image of a 50GB NTFS partition with a base Windows XP SP2 install, but your mileage may vary. If you can swing it, you should also consider throwing in an extra hard drive to function as the swap drive, to speed up access. In my system, that's a 2.5GB drive that I had lying around. By putting it on a separate IDE channel from everything else, I'm able to speed up performance a bit, but you may not have 4 IDE channels in your system.

After getting Windows up and running, install Linux as you normally would. Let LILO install to the MBR (for the sake of ease and not having to change the partition tables after installing Linux), and you should be good to go.

HTH.

If you want something simpler, forget the home partition. you might want a small (30-100meg) boot partition if you might want to try different distros and use custom kernels. doesn't sound like that'll happen though.

Why is NTFSD poorly supported? I noticed that there are a ton of NTFS read/write options during kernel compilation? Are those options a little misleading?

I got something REAL simple for mine:
I gotta say, I agree with the usage of FAT32 rather than NFTS... I was attempting to mess around on my school computers by accessing the hard-drive via Damn Small Linux and I couldnt write to it as it was NTFS!
The setup above was fairly simple to do, seeing as hda1-3 were already there, and all I had to do was delete the contents of hda3 and repartition that! Thinking back, I should really have taken the share partition outside of the extended to keep it tidier but that would have been unnecessary effort!

Bad idea.... while Linux is far less likely to need a reinstall than certain other OS's we can all think of, it's still a good idea to keep your user files in a separate partition in case you end up screwing the pooch somehow.



NTFS support is still experimental in the kernel. It has been since the 2.2 tree, but that's a moot point. Even though it's been around for longer than FAT32, the latter is far better documented and far better tested for the simple reason that until quite recently, mainstream MS OS's didn't support NTFS. You would have had to buy NT4 or 2K, both of which were far more expensive and not intended for consumer audiences. 95 OSR2 and above, however, had FAT32, and that's what came installed on most consumer PC's.

NTFS support is improving, but for now at least, FAT32 support is more mature.



I used to work for them before the bastards at HP decided they speak better French in India than in Canada. They could be right about that, but that's another discussion....

Anyway, that's actually the computer's BIOS. Back when CMOS and persistent memory were really expensive, somebody at Compaq clued in that on a 100mb+ drive, people probably wouldn't notice it if they stole a couple megs. So for many years, the BIOS on the motherboard had no smarts at all: it could boot a floppy, or it could boot partition one on the hard drive. That's it. It couldn't change interrupts, it couldn't change/disable any hardware at all.

Enter the CPQ diagnostics partition. That actually has a very customized version of PC DOS with a micro-distro of Windows 2.0 installed. The PC DOS checks a configuration file, loads the settings into RAM, and then boots the correct partition. If you're hitting the correct interrupt key, which is usually F10 on Compaq but could be DEL, F1, F2, or CTRL-ALT-S, it skips booting the next partition and instead starts the Windows, which had the diagnostics software installed, thus allowing you to change the configuration file, or run diagnostics such as scandisk, and hardware benchmarks.

Not really a bad idea, per se. Especially when hard drive size started taking off, they could include a few megs of diagnostic software that, unless the user was smart enough to check the partition tables (and believe me, most weren't and still aren't), could never be screwed over by the user, no matter how badly they'd borked their computer.

Until boot sector viruses and inquisitive users appeared. A boot sector virus was particularly dangerous, because it could completely wipe out the CPQ Diagnostics partition. Inquisitive users who found FDISK could do just as much harm. Still more dangerous were ignorant "techs" who saw it and decided that it was useless and to give the customer a few more megs of storage space.

When Compaq switched to off-the-shelf consumer hardware in around 1999 (the 5000 and 7000 series), the CPQ diagnostic partition went the way of the dodo, and with it a whole bunch of seriously annoying problems. Sadly, the only one that remained at that time was the lifetime software warranty that Compaq was selling with the computers until around 1992. Even in 2002, I had two calls for support on Windows 3.1, one of which was a "Quick" Restore that consisted of 4 DOS 5.0 disks and 6 Windows 3.11 disks. Both went to me, because I was the only one in the call center who'd actually *used* 3.1/DOS.

What are the advantages of NTFS versus FAT32? It is the default (I believe), in windows xp. If I had that partition formatted as FAT32, what would the drawbacks be, if any? Is the files must be smaller than 2GB the only drawback?

NTFS, theoretically, has better error correction, and is less prone to file fragmentation. It's also got a smaller cluster size, so small files waste less space.

Other than that, there's not really any major advantage.

Actually both FAT32 and NTFS have the same cluster size, 4KB.

The main difference is performance and security. NTFS writes the FAT table in the middle of the partition and FAT32 writes it at the beginning. On a empty HD, FAT32 is faster and on a full drive where you are accessing files from across the partition, NTFS is faster. NTFS also supports security so you can block access to folder and files using Windows Security.

NTFS is a direct rip-off of HPFS from IBM's OS/2. High-Performance FS has 512b (byte or half a K) cluster size and like NTFS, has a fragless FAT table. NTFS does fragment much more than HPFS does but in the end, HPFS is better. I would prefer NFTS over FAT32 anyday, regardless of accessibilty. It's not often I share data from one OS to another. (W32 games don't work in Linux and most Linux apps won't work in W32)