Partition strategy needed

[inzzane]

i have recently received a new laptop:
P4 3.06G, 1G RAM, 60G HD
I also have a 250G external I will be carrying with it in most cases.

Win2K is preinstalled.

I am looking to reinstall Win2K and RH9, maybe even XP as well if it's feasible(as a program test area), on the same system but am wondering what the best way to partition a drive would be, and how much space for RH9 should I leave?

[elmers]

You can have different kinds of installations for RH9. You need to read the docs but you only need enugh space for RH9 and the swap disk. You can use your windows partition under RH9 if you mount it properly. I'm not sure about win2k but I ran 98,Xp and RH8 and had it set up so that RH has in total 4Gb, Win98 had 8Gb and WinXP had 120Gb in two partitions on a different hd.

[Starfury_2260]

windows partiton has to be fat32 or rh9 cant do anything with it i think

[elmers]

Deends on how you mount them, I think you can use NTFS under linux.

NTFS will be read only under Linux.

Here's what I would do, Izzane: Four patitions. First three partitions are 10GB, fourth is 30GB. Install Win2K first on the first partition. Then install WinXP on the second partition. Then install RH9 on the third partition. Use XP to format the 30GB space as FAT32. RH9 will automatically pick up XP and 2K and throw them in the boot loader for you (2K and XP will overwrite RH's without so much as a kiss on the cheek).

Now you've got your triple boot system, with a 30GB file-share partition that any of the systems can see.

That's how I've done it in the past and it worked well for me.

Some of the Linux gurus might have better ideas for you though.

I forgot to mention that if you use this method, XP might think it's native drive is D, rather than C. If you're neurotic like me, it might bug you, but it doesn't affect the performance of the machine at all. You just have to remember to install programs to D instead of C on the hard drive.

[elmers]

Ya what whir said sounds good.

[inzzane]

Thanks Whir, let me get this straight though.
Partition 1:10G-NTFS
Partition 2:10G-NTSF
Partition 3:10G-Fat32
Partition 4:30G-Fat32

???
Is this right? Am I correct in thinking RH9 needs to be on Fat32 as well as the 30G partition?

RH9 will have it's own style.

What I did is create a single partition in the Win2K installer and install 2K to that. Then creat another 10GB partition with the XP installer and install to that. Then in XP (with the disk management system in adminstrative tools), I created the two extra partitions. I left them both Fat32 I think. When you install RH, make sure you choose the correct partition (it's usually pretty obvious in the installer - the smaller of the two FAT32s) and it will overwrite the partition table for that partition and create it's own filesystem, usually EXT3. It will leave the last 30GB partition intact, as well as the first two NTFS partitions.

[inzzane]

Gotcha, thanks. Will give it a shot. I've been wondering what RH was for a long time. Now's my chance to find out!