Re: [TCLUG:11346] Linux and 17GB

[^chewie <chewie@wookimus.net>]

On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Agovic, Amer wrote:

>   I hope some of you guys can help me.  I have got a 17 GB HD and it has
>   3 partitions.The first one 5GB is reserved  for Win98, the second one
>   5GB is shared and on the third one (>1024) is Linux.  Linux is a mix
>   of SuSE 6.1,RedHat 5.2 and Slakware distribution.My problem is that
>   LILO and LOADLIN don't work so that only way to access Linux is
>   through bootdisk.Since I haven't been in the scene for a while I would
>   like to know if there is a new way to use either LILO or LOADLIN with
>   this configuration.

Amer.  I would reconfigure your HD to use the second parittion as the
Linux parition and the third as the Shared.  I wonder if that would still
work, since your first partition is 5 gig in size.  Ideally, it would be
nice to have at the least an 80MB partition at cyl 0 for Linux root, and
then perhaps your swap partition.  After that, it's all up to you.

I'm not familiar w/trying to resize partitions and filesystems using Linux
tools, but you could use a program like Partition Magic to move things
around.  Were I to set up my computer with the simplest partition scheme
possible, I'd do the following:

	Partition	Size	Filesystem	Mount Pt
	---------	------	------------	------------------
		1	7GB	Linux 		/
		2	64MB	Linux Swap	<NA>
		3	5GB	FAT32		/mnt/c
		4	~5GB	FAT32		/mnt/d

However, after my experience with doing dual boot on single HD systems,
I'd refrain from putting two OS's on a disk.  Instead, I'd buy a separate
HD for each OS -- it makes maintenance MUCH easier.  Plus, if repairing it
gets over your head, you can pull out the offending OS, change the active
boot drive and send off the bad disk to OnTrack. ;-)

An added bonus of having separate harddrives for each OS is that you can
then do more complicated paritioning of your disk for specific-task
machines.  For an internet server, I might pump most of my space into the
/var and /home directories:

		1	100 MB	Linux		/
		2	64 MB	Linux Swap	<NA>
		3	2 GB	Linux		/usr
		4	{rest}	ext		<NA>
		5	6 GB	Linux		/var
		6	6 GB	Linux		/home
		7	2 GB	Linux		/var/spool/squid

or something like that...  Just remember to make enough room for compiled
binaries and libraries for the different internet services, such as apache
mods or server-side scripting engines (PHP, JServe, etc.).

----------------------------------------------------------------
Chad Walstrom                         mailto:chewie@wookimus.net 
a.k.a ^chewie, gunnarr               http://wookimus.net/~chewie

   Gnupg = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31  1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD
----------------------------------------------------------------