Anyone partition hd like this?

i say go go 10/10/39/1 (win/lin/home/swap) with your partitions. like you said your /home will be the shared between win and lin for all your music and files, then the each of the 10s will be there for program installations for each os. and swap is well, swap.

you said you'll need to dual boot for gaming and some win-media websites... ugh, before you get ahead of yourself take a look into cedega for gaming and mplayer-plugin for streaming media.

cedega does not stop working if your membership expires, you're just no longer able to download the the latest version of the software from their website / get support. whatever version you have installed up to tha tpoint however will keep on working... it obviously also plays games better than pure wine does.

ehh, never liked swiftfox much, gave me some issues on the 64-bit side of things.

I would use something like this:
10GB-"/WinXP"(NTFS), memsize-"swap"(swap), 128MB-"/boot"(ext2), 10GB-"/"(ext3), the rest-"/WinShare"(fat32)

The reason people separate out the /boot partition is so that you can load the OS and specify in your fstab file that the /boot partition not be mounted, which is better for system security.

The Live CD should use Gparted or something similar as part of the install program. So just run the installer and it will ask you to set up the partitions (size and type) and assign the mount points. The installer should then format the partitions appropriately, and automatically install the software on the appropriate partitions. I'm not sure if the Ubuntu installer will know to install the kernel in /boot automatically; if not, you can always do this yourself and modify grub and fstab after you boot into your new installation.

The reason I wouldn't create an extra home partition is that many of the config files you would likely want to save will be in the /etc directory (and maybe elsewhere other than /home. In addition, the package installer will normally automatically determine where it wants to install for any particular program. Otherwise you may have to modify makefiles and build the packages manually if you want to change the defaults.

My guess is that Ubuntu probably has some install documentation on their site somewhere. It would be a good idea to run through all the documentation first since it should tell you more about how to do this stuff.

Heh everyone has their opinions, gonna answer a few things you posted though.


True, it really isn't needed once the bootup is complete. Most users don't really need to be worried about this, but you are absolutely correct that it is a slightly better way of doing things.


I didn't really understand which software isntallation that question was in reference to myself. If it is the linux software, it installs into /usr, windows software there is no benefit to installing it anywhere other than on your system disk really, as if you lose your system disk, you lose your registry, and thus most of your software is hosed anyways.


I do completely disagree with this logic in this context. In Gentoo or other build from scratch distros where a lot of time is spent tweaking the /etc config files I would agree, but for Ubuntu not a lot of time is spent by the user tweaking those files, and the software that does install there most of the time uses it for a very generic global setup that would get reinstalled upon reinstalltion(If a drive got formatted) and would be overriden by a local config file typically stored in the user's home directory. Thus the config files for the average user that are more important are usually those stored in the home directory.

Again though, for those of us running Gentoo or another distro where we spent a fair amount of time tweaking our /etc system config files(xorg, initscripts, or whatever) then I would say it is worth it to keep a backup of /etc, however I don't think having it on a seperate partition is a good idea as version incompatibilities can prevent it from being truly useful.


Heh that and there are a large amount of sites out there that give advice on install issues as well. Not to mention this one where if you can't find the answer via google, it aint a bad idea to post here for most people. Google first though.

Seablade

You might also want to get some type of external storage - perhaps firewire - since your hard is kind of small.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.... Insert Breath Here... AHAHAHAHAHA... Oh wait you were serious? For the moment don't worry about mounting and unmounting /boot. Mounting and Unmounting is what happens when Linux places a device in the filesystem. For instance instead of a CDRom being on drive D: it is instead placed directly into the filesystem at /mnt/cdrom or wherever you tell it to be. It actually happens on windows, it is just that it gets mounted to the address D: or wherever. There are a few automounters out there that emulate windows and mac mounting and unmounting drives for you, but it is worth it to get used to the specifics of it as a good just in case measure to prevent data loss. I believe Ubuntu comes with one automounter installed if I remember right. In as far as installtions... Um most people would say for the easiest time, install Windows, defrag hard drive, and THEN install linux. Let Grub handle the booting into one OS or the other. Seablade

ubuntu (and 99% of all gnome distros) use gnome-volume-manager which i believe uses udev and hal to mount all your junk... soem of the more light distros rely on alternatives like ivman or a hal/udev combo of some other sort...

Mounting is just the assignment of a hardware partition to a mount point in your Linux system so that you can access the files on that partition. A mount point is a directory somewhere in the root filesystem, usually a subdirectory in "/mnt". Most distributions have software that automatically associates hardware partitions to mount points according to the configuration you specify in the /etc/fstab file. Most modern distro's also automatically create the fstab file based on info you specify in the installer program.

The distro installer program normally asks you how you want to configure GRUB (or LILO) for boot options based on the OS's you have installed on the various partitions on your HD. The installer then runs grub which puts executable code on your MBR (in the first sector of your HD) which will run automatically after the BIOS transfers control to the MBR. That code will present you with boot options as you've previously defined them. If you install Windows after you've installed Linux, Windows will overwrite the MBR automatically and you will need to re-install the grub program on the MBR.

It's a toss-up as to wether or not it's best to install Linux or Windows first.

If you install Linux first, you can use the more powerful Linux partition management program in the installer to pre-partition and format your entire HD before you install Windows. Windows can't recognize Linux partitions, but it will recognize both the NTFS and the fat32 partition you created in Linux. However, since Windows will wipe your MBR during install, you will need to restore grub to the MBR after you've installed Windows; until you do that, you will only be able to boot into your Windows installation. There are several methods you can use to do this, but I would recommend backing up your grub config file to an external drive (actually I manually back up all my config files to a fat formatted floppy) before installing Windows. GRUB is also available for Windows, so you can run grub from Windows using your saved config file to get your old MBR back.

If you install Windows first, you will need to use the Windows installer to partition your drive for Windows NTFS and probably also the shared fat32 partition. If you go this route, create partitions of the specified size only, otherwise you will need to make sure all the data on your drives is contained within the amount of space needed so that when you use the Linux program to resize your Windows partitions and create new Linux partitions, you don't shrink the Windows partitions so as to erase data on the Windows partitions. Windows can't create Linux partitions, so you will still need to create those partitions in the Linux installer program.

The later route might be easier, but personally I've found that using both Windows and Linux programs to create partitions on a single drive can, in some cases, lead to incompatibility problems.