Partition Sharing
 

I'm running Mandrake 9.0, but I also want to install Slackware 8.1 on anther partition.

I was going to partition my Hard Drive in the following manner:

Windows 5GB
Mandrake / 7GB
Slackware / 7GB
SWAP 500MB
/home rest

The idea behnd this set up is that I should be able to access my home directory from both Slackware or Mandrake, just in case.

By pointing two distros to the same partition for the same job, am I going to cause myself some major headaches, stability-wise?

If this is worth a try, are there any special procedures to be aware of that I wouldn't normally consider?

Thanks for any advice in advance.

Well, not really. I don't usually think it's a great idea to have a same/shared /home partition simply because you may not have the same users/programs on both distros, and so on. I usually say for a "share" partitition, use something like /var OR /mnt/data or something. However, yeah, /home will work.

Watch the devices and their mount points in your /etc/fstab file, and during setup. You don't wanna format your drive with all your data on it, however if you are having your distro setup your /etc/fstab file for you during the install, you may in-advertently do that. Just watch the partition numbers and you'll be fine.

Cool

Oh...

Welcome to LQ :)

I have one more piece of advice. You can always mount a partition in either distro. Don't sell yourself short, or make a distro have to share a specific directory because those files are needed on both distros. You can simply mount it up, get the files and umount. It doesn't have to be auto mounted as long as it's not a mission essential partition such as /usr or /boot or worse /

Cool

I would not share /var as Slackware and other distro's have differences in these. This is where all your log files and such go so logs for Slack would be differ than Mandrake or any other distro.

Usually when sharing partitions and mounts, you can only usually get away with swap and /home.

Sounds to me like mounting, grabbing & unmounting seems the safest way to go.

My thoughts were on downloading programs - I wasn't going to download somthing twice if I wanted it on the two systems.

Thanks for the advice. Doubtless I'll be posting my woes here when I do get round to installing Slackware.

Definitely agree tricky :) I should have expanded that, something like /var/files However, yeah, I should have just left that out all together to alleviate any confusion :)

Cool

well i'd still say go for it really. you won't have to download something twice... well.. not unless you would be using different package formats anyway.. i.e. rpm and tgz. if you're just doing it from source then compile it in the shard parition and just reconfigure and recompile under each system.

Swap is always safe to use for any distro, theres even a HOWTO at www.tldp.org for setting windows to use the swap partition! Maybe /tmp as a common partition, and home really won't kill you if you are doing it for a one user home PC, at worst you could make a different regular use account in each distro so there are unique /home directories.

On sharing, just mount the other distro into the tree, won't hurt to make it a permanent setting in fstab either though I'd suggest to wait until after install so you don't get stuck by the installer thinking for you and formatting your other distro.
in Slackware, mount Mandrake as /mnt/mandy
in Mandy, mount Slack as /mnt/slack