Partitions
 

Okay, I got a few questions and comments on dual booting with windows xp and slack, and partitions in general:

1)I heard it's good practice to have the boot in a seperate partition and it's good to have it as the first partition. Is this true?

2)Or is it better to have the swap partition as the first partition?

3)Can I rearrange the partition order?

4)When making my partitions with fdisk under SLack and try to install Windows XP, I get messed up errors saying that the partitions are not windows compatible. Well, I delete one of the partitions under windows setup like it says I should, but it says the same old sht when I try to install. How do I fix this?

5)I deleted all the partitions I made with slack fdisk and made a 5gb partition for my winxp. Will this become the first partion when I try to make my other partitions with fdisk later on?

6)How do I make my boot folder a separate partition from /root partition?

7)How do I make my home folder seperate from my /root partition?

I have successfully done 6 and 7 under gentoo with its instructions, but I don't know if it's the same deal with slack.

When you have XP and Linux on the same machine, it's much easier to install XP first, and let it make the partition. Of course, you'd only have it be part of the drive.

I never did that, and see no reason why, myself.

This might be slighly faster.

AFAIK, no.

Yes.

It is good practice to make a separate boot partition for your Linux system and to make this a primary partition (Red Hat/Fedora Core does this by default), because the boot partition holds important information without which you can't start Linux.

To set up a dual boot with Windows, you need to install Windows first because Windows will not be able to recognise Linux. So, preference works according to the intelligence of the OS.

How you set up your partitions for Linux depend on your distro of choice. Some let you assign/mount the partitions, others will automatically rearrange the partitions according to system requirements and partition size.

It is however good practice to make separate partitions for /home, / (root), /usr, /usr/local, /var, /opt, /temp etc, but if you're new to Linux and don't know in advance how much data space you'll need for what partition, then just setting up a /swap and a / (root) partition might avoid running out of space on any given partition. I could make some recommendations on partition size, but much depends what your Linux system will be designed to do.

Putting /swap before any other partition (except /boot) will probably make the speed slightly faster. My SuSE installation certainly profited from having /swap first.
But if you want to keep /boot on a separate primary partition, this will be first. Then the Linux partitioner will make an extended partition where the other partitions will reside as logical drives.

Hope this helps,

Terri

I suggest you install Win XP first so you can replace the WinNT loader with LILO later. And make a FAT32 partition so you can transfer files from your linux partition to a partition which winXP can read.

Linux can read NTFS partitions but write support is buggy. However winXP by default cannot read linux partitions (unless you download rfstools - a program that reads reiserfs while in windows). So its nice to have a FAT32 drive as a go between.

I already installed winxp on a 5gb partition. So I'm guessing winxp is my first partition. Now I can't make my /boot the first partition right? Do I need to start over?

But you *can* make /boot be the first Linux partition. So in fdisk you'll have:

/dev/hda1 WindowsXP NTFS or FAT-32
/dev/hda2 Linux Bootable (your /boot partition)
/dev/hda3 Linux Swap
/dev/hda3 Linux (your / partition)

[EDIT: So you *don't* need to start over. When using a /boot partition you wanna make sure it's the first *Linux* partition; it doesn't matter that you already have a Windows XP partition]

Like people have said, installing Win XP first on only 5GB is good 'cause then fdisk can use the rest of the space to partition for Linux. If you'd used fdisk first and had left a partition for Win XP, it would have failed since Win XP would have been unable to recognize its partition. So, by having installed Win XP first, you're on you way to dual-boot happiness. Just start installing Slack (using insyte's or shilo's instructions) and make partitions using fdisk or cfdisk to your own tastes.

-zsejk

No, don't start over! Leave your 5GB partition to be WinXP, that's absolutely correct!

Sorry, if I wasn't very clear on that point in my previous post.

Any Windows installation needs to have first partition on your hd, i.e. hda1 is allocated to Windows. WinXP calls this partition drive C:\

Then, your first LINUX partition, i.e. partition 2 on your hard drive, hda2, you can assign to be the /boot partition. This one needs to be no bigger than 256MB.

Then, partition hda5, your THIRD partition, can be the /swap partition (about 1.5 to 2x the total amount of your RAM, but needs to be no bigger than 1GB for things to work fine), please note that hda3 will be the extended partition automatically created by Linux and that Linux will not necessarily label any partition as hda4.

All furher partitions will then get put within the extended partition as logical drives. You will only really need a /swap and a / (root) partition, but creating more allows for better system security and is easier to troubleshoot if anything goes wrong.

Terri

256 MB for /boot?

Don't you mean about 25 -50 MB or so? You really don't need much space at all for /boot. My /boot is 114 MB and 86 MB is free (23MB used) -- and I have 7 kernels and 4 different (bootsplash) initrds in there. I could easily have made it half the size it is and still had room to put my feet up.

Thanks for the correction, Holly!

i agree with wats been said. if you coulda. having your windows partition FAT woulda been great. linux can read ntfs but i dont suggest writing to it.

Already did NTFS ops.. Anyways so I added new partitions.

Partition 1 /dev/hda1 (primary) Windows XP 5gb
Partition 2 /dev/hda2 (extended)
Partition 5 /dev/hda5 (logical?) /boot 32mb
Partition 6 /dev/hda6 (logical?) /swap 1024mb
Partition 7 /dev/hda7 (logical?) /root 10gb
Partition 8 /dev/hda8 (logical?) /home (takes up the rest of the hdd)

Does this look right? Do the partition numbers correspond with the hda numbers? I figured after extended, it would go to hda3, but it started at hda5? And then I figured hda5 would be considered partition 3, but I have to use d, 5 in order to delete hda5. So I guess hda5 is considered partition 5 and so on, but where did hda3/4 go? Are those reserved for 3/4 primary partitions? Also, now I think all I need to do is mount my /home /root and /boot to their proper partitions? I did it in Gentoo, but I never figured how to do it in Slack. Thanks for all of your replies!

Yes, that looks fine.

No, but that's normal. Write this information down, so you don't forget which partition is which. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

Yes. And hda 2 is actually the primary container for the extended partition. hda3 and hda4 do not exist on your system but these designations are reserved as one may have up to 4 primary partitions on any given hard drive. That's why logical partitions always are counted from 5 and up. Since the primary container (hda2 on your system) for the extended partition is just that -- a container, which does not itself contain any data except information on the extended partitions that it contains-- it is not "really" a partition and should never be operated on, mounted or accessed in any way.

If you are re-installing Slack, just use custom partitioning, select each partition, and choose the correct mount point and filesystem (if they need to be reformatted, or "initialized"). If you are transferring a previous installation to a new set of partitions, I think I'll let somebody else answer ;) .

Good luck!

Okay, I think I got nearly all of it done. The problem is lilo won't install to the MBR during the initial setup. Now I don't know how to install it and I don't want to have to go through the whole slackware setup again. Any ways around this?

lilo -M device

take a look at: man lilo

Okay... I've typed in lilo, liloconf, /sbin/lilo, lilo -M device, and all of these, excluding liloconf, get the error /etc/lilo.conf does not exist. Does this mean I need to make my own lilo.conf? I read man lilo but I don't even know which part I need. The manual is still confusing wtf...

edit

basically all the lilo commands I've entered have given me lilo.conf does not exist... I thought writing to the MBR was "dangerous," but sht... It won't even write to the mbr in the first place. In the setup it says that lilo will overwrite any boot loader in the mbr, but it doesn't even do that, it just gave me an error of not being able to install. I don't care if it's dangerous; just install omg.