Re: FC10 dual boot on new XP machine, partitioning

On 12/07/2008 04:20 PM, tns1 wrote:

Dell 1525 laptop

This new PC has the following primary partions:
A fat16 partition of about 40MB (EISA configuration)
A ntfs partition of around 280GB (XP system)
An extended partition containing a fat32 partition of 2.5GB (MediaDirect)
A fat32 partition of 10GB (DellRestore)

Some of these are unfamiliar so I don't know if there are any restrictions on moving/resizing them. If I keep them, it seems like I'd have to more shuffling than I have done before if I am going to add the ususal boot, /, swap, particularly if boot needs to be a primary, and I'd also guess that the EISA partition needs to be primary and stay in the first 1024 cyls much like boot. The system still needs to preserve its original system restore

and media direct functionality.

I did give the FC10 installer a try, but it is not up to the task of automatically resizing and moving partitions, so

I am using gparted on a Knoppix CD to do the heavy lifting.

1) Does anyone know what restrictions there are on moving/resizing the existing partitions above?

2) What would be the simplest workable partitioning for dual boot?

I generally run several linux installfest per year. The way I set up dual boot is:

1. resize the existing Windows XP.  (partition 1) NTFS
2. Sometimes Windows uses a second partition. That can be resized also.

3. The next physical partition I set up as extended, and use the rest for Linux:

   1. Swap - 2 or 3X memory.
   2. Root - maybe 10 - 20 GB
  3. Home - any size you need

In your specific case, I would let the Fedora partitioner allocate the root and home partitions. You would probably need to reduce the size of the XP partition. Neither /boot nor swap need to be primary. In the past on my old system, partition 1 was always the extended and everything was a logical partition. The reason for /boot to be a separate partition is that the MBR needs to be able to point directly to the stage2 in /boot, and on large drives you want to make sure it is somewhat close to the beginning. I don't recall the number of cylinders off hand.

Another thing that I am recommending for new multi-core systems is not to resize at all, but to use virtualization so you can have both Windows and Linux running at the same time. I have Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate running under KVM/QEMU on my desktop with Windows XP Professional as the guest OS on my laptop under Virtualbox.

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Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix
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