Where shall I install Linux-Suse? on the Primary Hard drive? 1

[cgkeller]

I have an AMD Computer, 1.9 GHz with a single hard drive of 40 GB (not partitioned) and Windows 98SE.
I intend to buy and install a Maxtor 120 GB Harddrive as a secondary drive, partitioned like this: 30 GB for Data, Word and Excel, and Accounting, 30 GB for Music & Video, 30 GB for Pictures and 30 GB for Linux Data.

Where shall I install Linux-Suse program?
Shall I first delete my Windows 98 SE on the primary drive
(and keep a clone on a removable hard drive). Then shall I create 1 partition for Linux-Suse program, 1 small partition for File System Reise, and 1 partition for Linux Data or shall I put the Linux Data on the new secondary drive?

After that, I guess I will have to re-install Windows 98 SE on the primary drive.

What is the preferred dual-boot-program, LILO ror GRUB?

I asm in the dark as to what comes first, so a step by step description would be very helpful.

Thank you for your valuable help.

Charles Keller, Canada.

 

[flugh]

I would recommend installing Linux on the second hard drive initially. In fact, unplugging the Windows drive just to make sure you don't accidentally delete your current Windows data is a good idea (I FUBAR'd my whole media collection once, which leads me to mention you probably shouldn't drink too many beers while partitioning and formatting hard drives either ;-)).

After you install a few times and get comfortable, you can use something like Partition Magic to resize the Windows partition (Suse may have something to do this during installation already) and move Suse to the primary hard drive.

Using multiple partitions for data is a Good Thing too in my opinion. Especially having a VFAT filesystem you can write to in Linux and then read from Windows (not as easy to do with NTFS filesystem).

Again, first few times (you'll probably end up redoing the install several times just for funsies) keep the loseable data on a hard drive not connected to the system if you can. That way you don't learn the hard way what not to do ;-)

----
JBR

 

[santanudas]

Well, from my experiences of a duel boot system, whatever HDD you use (primary or secondary), first make a 120-150MB non-dos partition on your primary drive starting from the first block, then install Windows. Having finished the windows installation, start installing Linux and mount that non-dos partition as /boot. Make swap partition (at least double the amount of your physical memory) and make a single “/” partition (if you Linux is not gonna do any mission critical tasks) occupying rest of the amount you wanna provide for Linux. These swap and “/” could be placed on the secondary partition. I never used Suse (RedHat gives my bread & butter) but installing should be the same for any flavour of Linux, I suppose.

I suggest to use GRUB rather LILO.
Cheers

 

[ericbrunson]

If it matters, I agree with santeramos' recommendation of GRUB over LILO.

 

[cgkeller]

Memo to Flug, Santanudas and EricBrunson:
Thank you very much for your valuable help.
Santanudas says "Swap partition: at least double the amount of my physical memory". I have 512 MB of RAM; should I make this swap partition 1024 MB? Should this be also a non-dos partition, besides the 150 MB already made? I guess this should also be before Windows 98 SE.

Perhaps I should revert to Red-Hat instead of going with Suse.

Thank you for your answers.

Charles.

 

[santanudas]

All the partitions used by Linux are actually non-dos. I’m referring ‘non-dos’ because if you use ‘fdisk’ from dos/windows, it will list all the Linux partitions as “NON-DOS”. In front of Linux, it’s “Linux Native”, ex2/ex3 file system. Not necessarily you need to create all the Linux partitions prior to install windows but I the first one (/boot) which I highly recommend. What I suggest, get the Linux boot disk, boot the machine FIRST off the disk, follow the on-screen instruction and proceed until you get the screen for creating partitions. “fdisk” or “disk druid” – option is yours (I suggest fdisk); make a primary partition of ~150 MB, press “w” (if you use “fdisk”) to write it to the partition table and then terminate the installation procedure.

Then take a Windows98 boot-disk, boot off the disk and select “command prompt only” and run fdisk with larger disk support. Now create the partitions for Windows (you already know how to do that I assume) as you want it has to be. What I do here, I create a primary partition for “C” drive (just to keep the windows OS on it) and take rest of the space as extended drive. Then I create a logical partition “D” to install all the third party software and few more logical partitions, one by one as I need, keeping enough space left for Linux. Press “Esc”, quit fdisk and win98 respectively. Now you can start install WinXP or whatever windows you wanna install. I assume, you will go for WinXP; format the drives as NTFS during installation if you not a windows game fanatic.

After that, start installing Linux. You will get the same “fdisk” screen again, where u created your very first non-dos partition. This time, you already got your partition for “/boot” and you just need to create “swap” partition and a “/” at least. This time select ‘logical’ from the fdisk screen to create those partitions; those will take the spaces you left under “Extended Partition” when you created partition using Win98 disk.

Otherwise, I think, you can create three primary partitions (in stead of one) for “/boot”, “swap” and “/”at the very first time when you created the first non-dos partition using your Linux boot disk. But I never tried that way so I’m not sure how that will perform.

Finally, I arrange my drives this way when I install a dual boot system; this may not be the best possible solution. I’d like to hear from others what they think about it. Cheers.