Windows/Linuux Partitions – 1890 days old

[jasper5408]

Hey guys, my computer runs pretty well with Windows Xp/Linux Slackware distro and I dont really have any problems with my computer.

But I was just wondering if there is a more sensical way of partitioning the hard drive. In Grogan's Slackware guide he suggests (I believe) 6 partitions. Although I don't understand it all completely, it does make some sense to me.

I'm pretty sure it is possible to create a partition for just media. So both the Windows and the Linux partition can read from the same partition but, I'm not sure if they could both write to the same drive. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or knowledge about this topic, and what would be their opinion of the best way to partition a 120 gb hard drive.

[Grogan]

I don't suggest that anymore. (that was old school thinking)

I just use a single, self contained partition for the root filesystem nowadays with additional storage partitions mounted under /mnt (e.g. /mnt/storage). This means that /, /usr, /var and /home and stuff are all on the same partition. Just be sure to make it big enough.

If you want a common partition that you can safely write to from both Windows and Linux, you will need to have a FAT32 filesystem on it. This is not a problem to do.

[TJM4FUN]

Yes most linuxes will now happily live on one partition, have been that way for a while. In my insane setup on my 60 laptop drive, I have 7 os's, and 2 data partitions. here's a pic of the yast graphical layout, this is rather extreme, but I feel it is a good layout for all that on one drive:
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~tjm4...rtpartlist.JPG

the layout has changed a bit since then, but it gives you an idea of how far you can go with no issues, other that remembering who really does own the lilo install!

[Grogan]

Yes, and note that he's sharing the swap partition between installed distros. All you need is a root partition and a swap partition to run a Linux distro.

[jasper5408]

Oh really? Why not the 6 partitions made sense enough. And also is the swap partition even necessary? Is it still recommended on current systems like my laptop has 2gb of memory. Should I still add a swap partition?

And does a common partition make sense? Are there any negative consequences that I'm not forseeing?

And If there is none a simple 15 gb Windows partition + 15 linux partion 90 common partition make sense? I mean I understand it probably won't matter much, its probably analagous to asking which distro to use (try em all) or which windows manager to use (try em all).

[Grogan]

Yes, you still need a swap partition. There are always smart asses who think they can second guess that but they are wrong. It's needed to aid in memory management and also, you don't want to run out of memory addressing otherwise the kernel will start to kill processes and it won't necessarily be the ones you want it to kill during a race condition or something.

I don't like to give specific partitioning advice because it is indeed a matter of personal preference. It's up to you if you want your Linux filesystem spread out on multiple partitions, but I think it's needless complexity and wasteful of space because you have to make the partitions large enough. It would do you no good to have a huge /home partition and run out of space on /usr or /var, for example.

I probably would not make a FAT32 partition larger than 32 gigabytes. For one thing, Windows XP will not allow you to create it (you'd have to use other partitioning/formatting utilities). It could use it if you did though. FAT32 doesn't scale very well, it becomes wasteful and inefficient with large partitions. You could always create more than one if you think you'd need it.

[TJM4FUN]

As was stated, how to do it is a matter of personal preference.
fat32 is well supported in linux, but isn;t great in large partitions. Also if you think you are going to be doing video sized files, over 4gb, fat32 won;t support that. In windows, you would need a ntfs partition, but linux write support is not supposedly fully supported, but it reads are fully supported. So if you are going to do work with files like that, you really would need to have the ntfs for that, and if you wanted to work the fil, a large ext2 or 3 partition for linux ot manipulate that file, if you so desired.
In a case like that tho, I would say you can likely write it if the files on the ntfs partition are not important, so if a problem occurrs you won;t loose anything. There are also drivers available now for windows to read an ext2/3filesystem, so you could just use windows to copy it back to ntfs.
Note that this is a specific case, if you don;t do dvd rips or such, then just find some numbers you find comfortable for your needs. I would suggest you have one data partition for each tho, no need to have windows corrupting any linux files that you may inadvertantly open. you may want to keep one partition for testing new distros in, it does get kinda addicting to try ones and find nice toys some distros have

[jasper5408]

I don't suggest that anymore. (that was old school thinking)

I just use a single, self contained partition for the root filesystem nowadays with additional storage partitions mounted under /mnt (e.g. /mnt/storage). This means that /, /usr, /var and /home and stuff are all on the same partition. Just be sure to make it big enough.

If you want a common partition that you can safely write to from both Windows and Linux, you will need to have a FAT32 filesystem on it. This is not a problem to do.

I'm kinda new to linux so this kinda confuses me a little bit. Could you further explain? It still seems like you have multiple partitions but I may have misinterpretted it.

[Fingerle]

Hey Jasper, You really only need two partitions for Linux. One that gets mounted as root, ( / ) and a small 1 to 2 gig partition for swap.

Now if you want to be able to access files between Windows and your linux install (Read/Write), You need to have a partition that's formatted as FAT32, as the stuff used for linux to read/write an NTFS partition isn't quite perfected yet and can still mess up the files on the partition. It's getting there, but I wouldn't quite trust it as of yet.

Anyway both Linux and Windows can flawlessly access the FAT32 partition.
You can easily set it up when installing linux.

[edit]
So what you would have is something simmilar to this.
SDA1: NTFS (Where you have your windows install)
SDA2: Linux
SDA3: Linux SWAP
SDA4: FAT32 (This is where ya put all the crud you want to access in both winblows and Linux)

[Grogan]

I would revise that a bit. Keep all the Windows partitions together. Create a Windows partition during Windows XP setup and leave the rest unpartitioned. From within Windows (Disk Management, in Administrative Tools/Computer Management) create and format any additional Windows partitions you want to have (e.g. your FAT32 partition). Again, leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned.

Install Linux and create your Linux partitions on the unpartitioned space.

It is best to stick with this convention, so that Windows doesn't encounter foreign partitions. In the Win9x days, Windows tended to stop parsing partition tables as soon as it ran into foreign entries. This is not the case anymore, but I just don't trust Windows disk utilities not to scribble.

[BitBender]

Aye, and I can tell you, as a user of this technique, it works very well. the zosnix emulator is configured this way. The grand master organG-2.1.6.14.3a (rev level 6) convinced this ammendment upon me when we built it last year

That configuration has been more trounble free than any thing I have done in a long time. It just works. Unless... I try and do stupid stuff to it Programmers.. what can ya say

[Grogan]

It still seems like you have multiple partitions but I may have misinterpretted it.

Yes, you caught that right. I do actually have multiple Linux partitions, it's just that they aren't part of the filesystem hierarchy. That's the important point (I don't have any parts of the system mounted on additional partitions, only storage).

I have additional Linux partitions (I have two physical disks) mounted under /mnt for storage and installing games and other external software (e.g. vmware) that's not really part of my system.

I compile all my software from source, so I want it all on one root partition so I can easily back it up with tar.

Here's all my shit mounted, just so you can see what I do:

[root@cramit grogan]# df -hT
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1     ext3    7.6G  2.7G  4.5G  38% /
/dev/sdb6     ext3     60G   19G   41G  32% /mnt/raptor
/dev/sda6     ext3    120G   78G   41G  66% /mnt/storage
shm          tmpfs    2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1     ntfs     51G   44G  7.0G  87% /mnt/windows
/dev/sda4     ext3     50G  4.0G   43G   9% /mnt/othersystem
/dev/sda7      ufs    8.6G  4.2G  3.7G  54% /mnt/freebsd

(/dev/sda7 is not really "sda7" it's just the hackish way that you have to access a disklabel on a freebsd slice in Linux. It's treated like a weird logical drive on /dev/sda2, which is the BSD slice)

I have two Linux systems that I built from scratch, one is 64 bit and the other (mounted right now on /mnt/othersystem) is 32 bit for games that don't have source and no 64 bit binaries. Both of those Linux installations are self contained, on their own root partitions. (swap is /dev/sdb5 and is not shown in there) Normally I don't mount all that stuff unless it's needed though. This is what I'd normally have accessible and is auto mounted at boot (entries in fstab)

[root@cramit grogan]# df -hT
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1     ext3    7.6G  2.7G  4.5G  38% /
/dev/sdb6     ext3     60G   19G   41G  32% /mnt/raptor
/dev/sda6     ext3    120G   78G   41G  66% /mnt/storage
shm          tmpfs    2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm

/mnt/raptor is where I install games (sdb is a western digital raptor, hence the name of the mount)
/mnt/storage is storage, and vmware virtual machines. vmware is an example of what I consider "external software" because it's proprietary crap. It's not "mine", I'm only renting it lol

[jasper5408]

Ok, I understand better. Out of curiosity do you put in your /dev/sdb6 vs /dev/sba6


And I also read that linux made even more strides in reading/writing on ntfs. But the concerns may or may not still apply, I don't know. I'll wait for someone's personal account on a blog or something.

[TJM4FUN]

On the ntfs note, in the setup I had originally, xp was an ntfs file system.
I had no issues at all reading it within any linux distro I used. and had written it many times, small, non critical files tho. It would force a chkdks to run on xp reboot, no problems found. That said, I still would not recommend writing on the os partition if it is ntfs, unless in an emergency recovery situation.
To be more clear in thsi setup, XP is the primary partition. everything after that is all extended, the first extended partition is the common fat32 partition, and there after it is all linux.

Here is a current pic of how xp sees things. note it has no idea about the linux partitions and what they are. partition magic does have a better clue, as seen in the second shot.
this follows the keep windows together and linux together practice.

You may want to peruse this old how to I did on installing suse amid a bunch of other os's and the partitioning and mounting of the various partitions. it;s a bti old, but it may help, at least the early parts, I did try to explain things with screenshots.
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/forum...ad.php?t=66029

[Grogan]

Ok, I understand better. Out of curiosity do you put in your /dev/sdb6 vs /dev/sba6

It's not actually me that does it, it's how disks are enumerated. The first SCSI disk (SATA in this case, but it uses SCSI nomenclature) is /dev/sda and the second disk is /dev/sdb. Then there is partition numbering. 1 to 4 are primary partitions (including extended). Logical drives start at 5.

As for NTFS write support, there's now a userspace driver called NTFS-3G and they say it's safe, but NTFS is a very complex filesystem and could blow up in your face if errors occur. I'd stick to FAT32 if you want to write to it from Linux.

[jasper5408]

That was a really good/informational read Tjm thank you.

And I left out the word "what" and it should have been

Out of curiosity what do you put in your /dev/sdb6 vs /dev/sba6

Basically im asking the content of those partitions.

[Grogan]

/dev/sdb6 just happens to be a partition on my second disk, and it's where I've chosen to install all my Linux games like doom3 (and variants), quake4, sauerbraten, alien arena, cube, assault cube, quake3 arena, serious sam, extreme tuxracer and unreal tournament 2004. I have google earth and a few other assorted things there too. sdb is my fastest disk (western digital raptor) so I put software there instead of just storage.

/dev/sda6 is storage. Source tarballs, music and other media files, build directories and vmware is installed there. I basically work on that partition. sda is a western digital 250 Gb caviar. Not quite as fast as the raptor but respectable. For vmware, the virtual disk access is the bottleneck so it doesn't matter how fast the disk is.

I don't store stuff on /home because I like to keep my filesystem small for backup purposes. The only thing in my home directories is program configuration data and temporary stuff I might be working on immediately.

[jasper5408]

So your /home is just under sdb1?

[Grogan]

Yes, /home is just a directory on the root filesystem. I don't use it for storage.

What I do is create a directory on the storage partition and "chown grogan:grogan" it so I can write there as a user. I install all of those games as a user too. No need to be root to edit my game files.