Partitioning Question

[Nursedad]

Greetings!

I am thining about installing Mandrake 8.2 on my system. Currently, I have WindowsXP installed on an NTFS partition. I want to have a dual boot system.

I have one hard drive and the whole thing is formatted in NTFS. Since my whole drive is NTFS partitioned, I want to make sure that I'm following the proper procedure when making a new partition (with partition magic) for the Linux installation.

When using partition magic, do I need to resize the NTFS partition or can I simply use the wizard to create a linux partition?

Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide.

- - Nursedad

[michaelk]

You will need to resize the NTFS partition to free up space for linux. You can then use the wizard or the linux installer to create the necessary partitions.

[askrieger]

Go to the Power Quest website. They have an explicit How-To (with animation, even) on setting up dual booting for Win (2k,XP) and linux. I've done it and it worked almost exactly the way they said it would.

There were two minor(?) problems. First they advise that you get Mandrake to install Lilo in the linux partition rather than the MBR, so you can use Boot Magic as your installer, but if you use the non-expert installation, Mandrake doesn't give you a choice. Lilo works fine, though, so I don't think that's so bad.

Second, PM installs an ext2 file system on the linux partition. If you want ext3 or ReiserFS, you will have to reformat the linux partition during the Mandrake installation. I did not. The result is that I have to go through an fsck, every time I do something stupid and crash the system. Fortunately, after almost 3 weeks with linux, that's becoming less frequent.

[CZAR]

when i installed Redhat it had an option to "use unallocated space for partitions"(which i had by deleting my 11gb partition with XP's admin tools) i don't know if Mandrake has this option but it was awesome,set up and formatted all my partitions automatically without any other input from me.

[rustskull]

Originally posted by askrieger
Second, PM installs an ext2 file system on the linux partition. If you want ext3 or ReiserFS, you will have to reformat the linux partition during the Mandrake installation. I did not. The result is that I have to go through an fsck, every time I do something stupid and crash the system. Fortunately, after almost 3 weeks with linux, that's becoming less frequent.

If it isn't doing it by default (and I haven't had this problem with linux yet, so I'm not sure...this is how it works in solaris, or else you wind up having to fsck TWICE every time you freaking reboot, much less crash) there is the option to mount your root drive with "logging" enabled, which makes even crash forced fsck'ing go faster...maybe that's what reiserfs does, IIRC, it's supposed to be a journaling fs and I think that's pretty much what enabling logging on a solaris box does...so...sorry if it's not relevant...

-rust

[askrieger]

According to the Mandrake reference manual, both ext3 and Reiser are journaling file systems. They go on to say that ext3 is preferred for servers and Reiser for databases,while "a simple desktop machine will be happy with Ext2FS", but, at least, they also add a YMMV. :)