Hi,

When I installed my SuSE 9.1 Personal (free version), it was onto a hard disk which had Windows XP set up in a 60Gb partition, and another primary partition of 20Gb set aside for linux. This was sheer guesswork, as I didn't know how much space I would need for a software development system - I've been out of touch for a few years! Anyway, I still don't know how much I ought to have allowed - any suggestions?

The installation automatically assigned 3 partitions for Suse. One for all the system and applications on reiser, one of about 1Mb for swapping (on what I can't recall), and a third. Regarding the latter: XP's Device Manager does not recognise it at all, and just shows two linux partitions; Nero says it's a "Primary 7.84 MBUr" and won't let me resize the window to see the full description; and Paragon Drive Copy shows it as "Unallocated" 7.84Mb capacity, with 2048Gb used, 0 free. My question is this... What is this third partition?

I intend to clone my hard disk to a bigger one, and I want to know how best to reallocated the three partitions. I'm understand that leaving the swap as it is, approximately 1Gb (twice the size of my RAM) is normal, and I'm ok with changing the Reiser system to a few Gb more, but what is the third linux partition, and how big should it be?

Thanks in hope,

Jess

The Linux-command 'fdisk -l' can tell you more about the partitioning. If you need help to interpret the output, just post it here.

Usually SUSE creates two partitions in the default setup, one swap and one for the rest.

Hi abisko00,

"fdisk -l" only reported two partitions; but I am now convinced that there are three. Perhaps the third doesn't show up because it's some type of logical (as opposed to primary) partition?

I accidentally found half the answer the other day - but I can't recall where. The 3rd partition is a "boot" partition, apparently, and only needs to be 8-10Mb in size. So, presumably, (as I believe is the case with the swap partition) I need not make it any bigger than it already is when I enlarge my main partition.

Is this "boot" partition the actual MBR on sector zero, I wonder?

Cheers, JessJ

No, the boot partition should be a small regular partition with a Linux filesystem that contains the kernel and other boot-related files (ramdisk, bootloader configuration...). What makes me wonder is that it doesn't show up in 'fdisk-l'. This command usually shows all recognised partitions (since it reads the partition table). I one doesn't show up, I'd assume it does not exist. For fdisk, it doesn't matter if a partition is primary or logical.

The default partitions made by yast in suse 9.1 for a small harddisks are logical:
1) \boot with ext2
2) \ with reiser
3) swap partition
I suppose windows and linux could share the same swap partition?

Rather unlikely. Although I heard it was possible, this wouldn't be part of a default setup. I suppose that there have to be major adjustments to be made in both OS.