partitiaon help
 

i am a linux newbie and slackware was my first distro. i had a pre built slack system. now i want to try to install to my laptop.. however i know nothing of partitions.. i have and 80 gig harddrive with sixty 60gig free space. i want to partition this right down the middle forty window foty for slack. i am requesting advice with specific commands)on how to partition this correctly and how to partition in general

cfdisk if Windows isn't already installed. If it is, boot from the GParted live CD (google it) and use the graphical partitioner.

thanx for your input really however i had to do this manually for the learning experience. is this the only way to partition this

No, but those are going to be easiest. Is Windows already installed? cfdisk and gparted are pretty self-explanitory.

yes window is installed. I will try Gparted with cfdisk for now but i will eventually want to do these partitions manually..

cfdisk will erase the Windows partition if you're resizing it. Use the gparted tool (or parted from command line).

ok thanx i have slacked my machine with the gparted tool provided with my mepis live cd. it is working but i will eventually want to do this manually with fdisk...

You can NOT resize a partition with fdisk. It WILL delete the data.

Plus parted/gparted are infact manual too.

thebiggiantmouse,

If you are asking how the free space on the drive should be partitioned for a Slackware laptop, I'd say it doesn't matter much. I use a 25mb ext2 partition for /boot, a Reiser logical partition for / and a swap partiton, of course. If you plan to use suspend the swap needs to be big enough to hold your RAM plus video RAM since suspend uses swap to copy to.

Lots of different ways to slice & dice, but for a home desktop or laptop it's not worth the effort. Keep it simple.

Dennisk

Remember to backup your data before partitioning.