Partitioning a hard drive.

[Jonny Tight Lips]

I was just wondering how to partition a harddrive. I was thinking about putting lunix on one and keeping windows on the other. Do you have to format your hard drive before you can partition it? If you could tell me how o do it or give me a link to a site that would be great. Thanx

[wtd]

Which version of Windows?

[Jonny Tight Lips]

Windoes XP home

[wtd]

First, back up important files before you do any partitioning or formatting!

Then read this:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

[Jonny Tight Lips]

I have some questions:
1) What do I do if I don't have a windows disk?
2) Do I want system partitions, startup partitions, or nethor?
3) Do I want primary, extended, logical partitions?
4) Holy crap that stuff is confusing!!

[wtd]

Then you'll likely need a utility like Partition Magic which can partition without destroying data.

If you don't have a valid copy of Windows you're gonna have to be real careful about this, since there's a good chance your existing Windows install is going to have to die first.

[Jonny Tight Lips]

Is Partition Magic a free program or am I gone to have to aquire it.

[josh]

acuire it

[Jonny Tight Lips]

I have some questions about what type a lunix partition should be:
1) Should it be fat, ntfs, linux Ext2, linux ext3, linux swap?
2) Should it be logical or primary?
3) How much space (approximatly) will linux take up?

[wtd]

Jonny Tight Lips wrote:

I have some questions about what type a lunix partition should be:
1) Should it be fat, ntfs, linux Ext2, linux ext3, linux swap?
2) Should it be logical or primary?
3) How much space (approximatly) will linux take up?

Your Linux partition should probably be ext3. Others will work, and are often more advanced, but ext3 is a safe bet.

Now, what I suggest is settting up the first partition on your drive for Windows (NTFS, FAT32, whatever), then leaving the rest as one big partition for Windows.

LInux installers will generally (Ubuntu does, and it uses a pretty standard Debian installer... I can't speak for Red Hat's Anaconda installer) detect the presence of Windows and offer to automatically partition the remaining partition for you, selecting the appropriate partition types, mount points, and file systems.

As with all things involved in building a dual-boot system, I highlyrecommend you do your research. "Read or Bleed".

[Jonny Tight Lips]

Yes, as with the duel boot system, does anyone have any experience using bootmagic (apart of partition magic). I just want to know how it works and wether I should put my trust in it working properly. Don't really want my system to not boot. So if you know anything about it, I would apreciate it.

[Brightguy]

I'm not sure if it was bootmagic, but I used some Partition Magic utility that allowed you to choose your OS. It worked, but my problem was switching back to XP. I used win98 fdisk to switch the active partition back, but now XP wont boot. So you should probably make those Partition Magic recovery discs just in case. (And everyone convinced me that floppy discs are useless...) So now I'm looking for a bootable CD, I got some friends to try this but I guess they didn't have their windows installation files.

[Jonny Tight Lips]

what do those recovery disks do anyway? There are somne for Partition magic and some for bootmagic what ones do you recomend I get and what do they do?

[Leftover]

Step 1: Always back up your stuff. Download a copy of XP home if you must, it's all good if you have a legal key.

Step 2: "aquire" partition magic, set your windows drive to whatever you want, and leave blank, unpartitioned space for the linux partition (Atleast 64 mb for a boot partition, the amount of your ram x2 for swap, and atleast 1gb for root, total for average system being about 2gb).

Step 3: Once partitioning is complete (and you are left with XP Partition and blank space), get a linux boot disk. All flavours of linux have some way to modify the partition table without wiping it, you just have to read the installation notes / docs. You partition the blank space according to the flavour (For example, Gentoo will tell you to make 64mb boot partition, whatever your ram is x2 for swap, and atleast 1gb for root)

Step 4: Install that flavour of linux and make sure you configure your boot loader to duel boot Windows / Linux. If you use grub (most flavours default to it) then a sample of code for the grub.conf would be:

code:

title=Windows XP root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1

That would tell grub to give you the option to boot the OS on the first partition on the first hard drive.

And you're done. You now have Windows and Linux installed and you are duel booting using a linux boot loader. Hope this helps.