Get help on partitioning here [Part 1]

darkfolk · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2005 Posts: 32

Make sure your partitions are properly mounted, since that could cause you to run out of of space, due to you being in a virtual filesystem.[/list]

Frerk · n00b Joined: 20 Jan 2005 Posts: 16 Location: Germany

Partition Magic 8 just screwed my 5 logical partitions with a running Gentoo Linux installed. It said the partition table had an error #141 and if it want it to be fixed. I clicked OK with mixed feelings but otherwise I would have had no access to the menus of PM.

All seemed well, I repartitioned and rebooted. Effect:

Win98 did boot normal, Gentoo didn't. And a new boot with PM
said error # 180 , but this time no fix was offered!

After studing Partitioning for 2 days I solved it with the help of the Gentoo Live CD based SystemRescueCD and the Ranish Disk Partition Tool (for Dos) which is freeware and included as a boot option.

Partition Magic seemed to have 'corrected' all of my logical partitions to begin at some strange boundaries some 63 sector after the real beginning and leaving some 0,4MB - 0,6 MB unused space between them.

I changed the beginnings until there was no more unused space between them and voila it worked again!

After going through partition hell I have 2 whishes:

1) qtparted should be capable of converting the first logical partition into a primary partition (the reason I used PM). Or did I miss something?

2) a partition table editor as good as Ranish as a Linux Version. Or simpler a harddisk-viewer-editor with hex display of sectors and an option to interpret it as a partition table. Does such a beast exist?

Frerk

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

how would i go about installing windows on the 3rd hard drive in my system, i know there is a way in grub to fool windows into thinking its the 1st hard drive..?
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dr chalcopyrite · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

Noob question:

I have Mandrake 9.2 on hda, would like to put Gentoo on hdb. How should I partition hdb? When I try to run the harddrake from within Mandrake, it doesn't like my making a / directory. Should I follow the Gentoo install handbook and make the directory structure as shown then add hdb to to either grub or lilo?

I have plenty of room on hda for /home to strore files.

thanks

curtis119 · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 2:39 am Post subject:

taipan67 · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:05 am Post subject:

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

dr chalcopyrite · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

taipan67 · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 3:10 pm Post subject:

dr chalcopyrite · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

I downloaded the iso image so I can load from there.

As for getting rid of Mandrake, I am for it. Some of the stuff crashes and I am sick of having to go in and kill processes all the time. I could start from scratch, backup my data and go from there with a reformated drive and install gentoo.

As for writing a long guide, it would be great. I can figure out things on my own if I have an outline as to where to get started.

taipan67 · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 8:03 pm Post subject:

Sorry for the delayed response - there was the small matter of beer & Premier League soccer to take care of

.

In my opinion, the least complicated - not to mention most prudent - approach would be to install Gentoo onto your 2nd drive by booting the LiveCD, & for the time being, to pretend that your other drive (the one with Mandrake on it) doesn't exist. Once you've successfully installed everything - including embedding 'grub' into hdb's Master Boot Record - you can put hdb before hda in your BIOS' boot-sequence. This will give you a chance to learn from any mistakes you encounter, while still having the option to revert to an Operating System that's up & running (even if it is Man-break).

I've actually spent part of this weekend trying to plan a 'tutorial' for the forums, tentatively entitled "Installation tips for first-timers", but i'm afraid it's not ready, yet. In the meantime, the first tip to go into it would be TAKE YOUR TIME! My only copy of the LiveCD is 2004.1 vintage, & i'm not sure how things have progressed from there, but when you first boot into it, you should see a 'boot:' prompt, above which is some advice about your boot-options (pressing F1 to list available kernels, stuff like that). Take the time to read everything you can, & if possible, select a 2.6-generation kernel, as opposed to a 2.4. That might require you to boot the 'SMP' kernel, but that's okay - it'll still work.

If your keyboard isn't of an American specification, you'll need to add the 'dokeymap' option to your boot-command, otherwise you'll have loads of fun trying to find your hash (#) key, amongst others.

Once your desired kernel is booted & the correct keymap selected (if necessary), you'll be automatically logged into the LiveCD as the 'root' superuser. The very first thing you should do at that point is change the superuser-password to something of your own choosing. I say this because the next thing to do is to log into more than one 'virtual terminal', & you can't do that unless you know the password. To change the password, simply type 'passwd' (just the six letters, not the quotes) & press enter, then follow the screen-prompts to enter your new password & confirm it.

Now you can log into at least one more terminal. You move around between terminals by holding down the 'Alt' key, & pressing any one of the first six 'Function-keys' (F1, F2, F3 etc.). This allows you to open the Installation Handbook in the 'links' web browser in one terminal, & enter the commands to install your system in another one, so you don't have to keep stopping & starting the browser with the Handbook in it. You could also log into a third terminal & use 'links' again, but this time to access these forums, & use them as referrences during the install.

The other thing that really makes life easier is knowing how to 'copy & paste' with the mouse in a text-mode environment. For your first install, i'd suggest following the Handbook's example with regard to partition layout & so on, & as such, many of the commands will be almost if not exactly identical. So you can avoid the tedium of re-typing everything, as well as the risk of mis-typing something, by highlighting it in the Handbook example by holding down the left mouse-button & dragging the mouse to the end of the desired text, just as you would in a 'windowed' environment. But then, instead of right-clicking & expecting to see a pop-up menu, you simply go to the terminal you want to enter the text in, make sure the cursor is in the right place, & (for 3-button mice) press the middle button (or wheel) to paste the highlighted text in. For 2-button mice, you use the right button.

That should avoid at least some of the most common hiccups you would encounter. I'll probably incur a bollocking for going so far off-topic, so i'll let you get on with it. If you have any installation-related questions that can't be answered by searching the forums, feel free to send me a personal message - i'll try to help as much as i am able

.
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dr chalcopyrite · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

We have the Super Bowl here today, I understand about beer and soccer.

I'll work on getting this working. Maybe I'll swap hard drives in the boot sequence or remove hda and keep it on the side in case something takes a tank and I can keep swapping.

I'll get to work on it and follow your suggestions.

thanks,

dc

taipan67 · Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 11:55 pm Post subject:

dr chalcopyrite · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 13

As is my norm, I screwed something up. Everything went fine, but I over wrote my boot record, so I had to do a fix on the other drive. Later this weekend, I'l remove my hda and go from there, reinstall and go on from there.

plut0nium · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:05 pm Post subject:

I need to reinstall my laptop (dual boot WinXP & Gentoo), it has a 60Go HDD. After reading this thread, I think i'll use the following partitionning scheme:

/boot >>> ~100Mo
swap >>> 512Mo
C: (Win) >>> 13Go
/ >>> 13Go
/home >>> 4Go
Shared Docs (Fat32) >>> the rest, about 30Go

what do u think about it ?
should i make the system partitions (C: and /) bigger ?
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HriBB · Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2005 8:11 am Post subject:

256ram, 20gb disk, apache2, mysql, php, ssh, mail
mainly for learning and testing, will host few low-traffic sites

what do you think?
50M /boot
500M swap
4G /
1G /tmp
3G /var
4G /usr
4G /home
~2giga spare (it's in the docs... should i rather just allocate it)

thanx
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oegat · n00b Joined: 12 Apr 2003 Posts: 41 Location: Sweden

ShinFu · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2005 7:24 pm Post subject:

hi everyone

i have installed gentoo a year ago so... i can remember certain things (back then i installed gentoo on a clean drive)

but i have gotten a new machine and so lost my gentoo partition

my current drive (160gigs) looks like this:

win (games)
win (work)
win (audio)
ntfs (audio data)
ntfs (backup data)

now i want to replace the win (games) partition with a gentoo partition, without repartition the
whole drive (i still need the rest)

how do i proceed??

curtis119 · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2005 9:31 pm Post subject:

ShinFu · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 8:39 pm Post subject:

curtis119 · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 2:39 am Post subject:

ShinFu, sda1 is C: always. Windows always installs itself to C: and C: is always the first logical drive. sda5 should be D: sda6 should be E: and so on. The only thing that would mess this up is if windows is assigning D: to a CDrom drive then sda6 would be E: and so on. If you want to be absolutely sure you can always boot from a liveCD and mount the individual drives and look at what data is on each drive. Knoppix makes this very easy with it's GUI if doing it from a gentooLiveCD is to much for you.
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brassj41 · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 39

Hello all, I have bought a new computer with a new hard drive, which is twice as big as anything I have ever had. As such, I have a few questions about partitioning.

How many partitions can you put on a drive?

Here is my proposed scheme: (120Gig drive)

Xenon2050 · n00b Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 63

Hey everyone!
I have two 80GB drives. One is completely for my Win XP partition and the other will be completely for my Gentoo partition.

So what I'm wondering if what you guys think would be a good setup. I am going to use the computer for games, music, web browsing and as a web hosting server. Since I plan on using it as a server for the web I want it to be fairly secure. Thus I'm wondering what the best ideas would be and how to implement them. You see i have only installed Gentoo once and i used the default stuff int he user manual, so how would you go about mounting the extra partitions and what order shoudl they be created in.

I was thinking something like this...

hda1 boot 32MB
hda2 swap 1GB (I have 1 GB ram)
hda3 root 5GB?(isn't root also / ?)
hda4 tmp 2GB
hda5 var 5GB (what's the var for again?)
hda6 home 15GB
hda7 usr 15GB
hda8 www 10GB (use as the main hosting spot)

I have a few GB left so what are some good ideas? Thanks for you help.

Oh and what would you recommend for FS for all of these? I was thinking ext2 on boot and ext3 on the rest, but I was also thinking maybe reiserfs...

brassj41 · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 39