Gentoo installation

spidna · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2004 Posts: 148

Would it be a good idea to just by one 120gig drive partition it into 2 with windows xp and gentoo, than 2 hard drives.
What is the advantages and disadvantages.

infamousmrsatan · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 1:28 am Post subject:

Well, sharing a hard drive with windows partitions can be tricky sometimes. For example, your gentoo partition will appear as one of your drives in windows, and windows will constantly ask you if you would like to reformat it (at least this happened to me before).

In general, what I've heard about having linux and windows on the same drive is that you want to install windows first so that it doesn't wipe out linux during its install procedure. (Linux is well behaved and will leave windows alone) From what I understand, it is possible to install linux first, but no one seems to recommend it.

Personally, I have 2 80gig hard drives, and one of them belongs exclusively to my gentoo install, the other one to windows. I would say that 2 hard drives is better, but not absolutely necessary. If price is a factor, and it costs quite a bit more to do the 2 drives than the 1, that might sway your decision.

JS
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BWoso · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 1:38 am Post subject:

I have two drive and I installed Gentoo and Mandrake on the second one, and then later installed XP Pro on the first one and all I had to do was re-run my boot loader so that it took over the one that windows installed. It would probably be nice to have two drive so that you can put windows and a FAT32 drive on one, and then Gentoo and any other linux stuff on another, but I'm sure that it wouldn't be very hard to use only one drive
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spidna · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2004 Posts: 148

infamousmrsatan, would you be kind to post your grub info, since i'm struggling to boot up gentoo with 2 hard drive. i thought maybe if i go with one drive it might make it easy for me.

BWoso · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 1:52 am Post subject:

I'm not real good with bootloaders so I am using lilo from Mandrake which is very easy to set up, so I wouldn't be able to help you with grub, but just as refrence my hda1 is windows, my hda4 is an extended partition, hda5 is FAT32, hdb1 is gentoo boot, hdb2 is linux swap, hdb3 is gentoo root, hdb4 is extended, and hdb5 is Mandrake
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infamousmrsatan · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 2:00 am Post subject: Re: gentoo installation

infamousmrsatan · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 7:04 pm Post subject:

Here's my grub.conf

rockfly · Apprentice Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 179

it doesn't realy matter if you have 2 or one drive. i have both working, you just can boot only 1 os at a time.

nerdbert · l33t Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 981 Location: Berlin

rockfly · Apprentice Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 179

windows doesn't show linux partitions. do you use vfat?

infamousmrsatan · Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2004 1:01 am Post subject:

No, and I guess it doesn't happen if you know what you're doing to begin with--

I set my computer up with a friend who had built a lot of windows systems before but didn't know squat about linux (and neither did I at the time).

I knew at the time that I wanted to dual boot windows and linux, but since my friend knew more about building a system than I did, but had no experience with linux, and since I'd heard that it its best to install windows first, we installed Windows 2000 on the system (which at the time had only a single hard drive). However, we DID know that we needed to leave a space for linux to live when I got around to installing it. This partition was formatted as ntfs and was recognized by windows as the E: drive.

Well, before I had gentoo, last summer I tried installing debian (which I never fully got the graphics to work for by the way -- I was stuck with a bare bones linux system. Gentoo went much smoother and was easier to install) on the partition which I had set aside for it. I deleted the partition then reformatted it into several partitions for the linux system that I planned to use. And got linux installed to some extent. But when I booted windows (since i didn't have any graphical apps on debian and was trying like hell to get it to work, and thus needed support from the internet) the E: drive was still there. You are right that windows didn't recognize the Ext/2 format, but it still remembered the disk partition that it thought belonged to it. Every time i would click on the disk it would ask me "The format of this disk is not recognized: Would you like to re-format the disk now?" And I would very slowly and carefuly click "no". I tried to set up windows to ignore the partition, but it spat some garbage at me like -- something about being unable to remove the drive since it was on the same physical hard drive that the OS was installed on. Weak.

Anyway, I just assumed that Windows would try to eat up linux partitions. I guess I was just a special case. Anyway, I am very very happy with Gentoo now. Since I have had Gentoo I have only booted up windows a couple times to make sure that it worked. I haven't used it at all.

Cheers.
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