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binarynova
n00b
Joined: 15 Mar 2004
Posts: 17
Location: Third planet from a yellow G-class star on the fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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 Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 5:52 pm Post subject: Question about partitions when Windows is already installed. |
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Hello all. I currently have a 120GB drive. During Windows XP's setup, I partitioned 1 NTFS partition of ~80GB for WinXP and left the rest of the partition table blank.
So, my question is how should I set up the partitions for Gentoo? I have 1.5GB of RAM, and from reading a few posts on here I've decided to forego (sp?) creating a swap partition at all.
My main concern is with the Boot partition. WinXP is occupying the first 80GB (at hda1). So should I make hda2 the boot partition? And how would I handle making that bootable?
I'm not sure why this is worrying me so much (this is not my first Gentoo install) but for some reason I'm not sure how to go about this.
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 6:02 pm Post subject: Re: Question about partitions when Windows is already instal |
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| binarynova wrote: | Hello all. I currently have a 120GB drive. During Windows XP's setup, I partitioned 1 NTFS partition of ~80GB for WinXP and left the rest of the partition table blank.
So, my question is how should I set up the partitions for Gentoo? I have 1.5GB of RAM, and from reading a few posts on here I've decided to forego (sp?) creating a swap partition at all.
My main concern is with the Boot partition. WinXP is occupying the first 80GB (at hda1). So should I make hda2 the boot partition? And how would I handle making that bootable?
I'm not sure why this is worrying me so much (this is not my first Gentoo install) but for some reason I'm not sure how to go about this. |
Hi. If you are new, just create a single partition for gentoo and go with that. When you know a bit better you can always backup, destroy and recreate a better partition scheme and restore gentoo again.
I dont know who gave you that advice, but to run w/o swap is never a good idea, even if the partition is not frequently used, sometimes the linux kernel does not behave correctly if there is no swap, it can slow down the thing significantly. It is true that you dont need so much swap, even with 100 mb you could do fine, but, personally, I think that you should not run without it. Of course it is your decission.
About the boot, well, you will almost for sure intall grub or lilo as boot manager. Those can be installed into the mbr, wich is an hd area that is outside the partitions, so you dont have to worry about making any partition bootable. Your win partition is the bootable and active one right now, and will continue that way unless you explicitly change it via fdisk or any other tool. That is fine that way, because windows is a silly spawn that wont boot if the partition is not marked active and bootable. Linux does not care at all about that things, so there is no need to make the gentoo partition bootable.
I know these are so general indications. If you need some deeper advice or help with any of this topics (or any other thing) feel free to ask here or pm me. I will be glad to help you if I can with my limited knowledge.
- Regards.  |
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binarynova
n00b
Joined: 15 Mar 2004
Posts: 17
Location: Third planet from a yellow G-class star on the fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 7:32 pm Post subject: Re: Question about partitions when Windows is already instal |
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| 6thpink wrote: | | I dont know who gave you that advice, but to run w/o swap is never a good idea, even if the partition is not frequently used, sometimes the linux kernel does not behave correctly if there is no swap, it can slow down the thing significantly. It is true that you dont need so much swap, even with 100 mb you could do fine, but, personally, I think that you should not run without it. Of course it is your decission. |
No one inparticular, it was just a trend I was seeing in many posts I read on the Gentoo forums. I believe I will take your advice though and just make a small 100MB or so Swap partition.
| 6thpink wrote: | | ... there is no need to make the gentoo partition bootable. |
Alrighty, that's what I thought. The new installation handbook seems to leave out any information regarding installing Gentoo while having a Windows install around. Is it just me, or did older versions of the handbook offer advice for that kind of setup? Oh well, it's no matter now.
Thanks so very much for the help. =)
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 8:14 pm Post subject: |
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Some more info about the swap thing: the kernel for the most part throws out pages rather than swap them out. Duplications of things on the hard drive are never swapped out but rather exist on the hard drive already and are just reread. But certain types of unique generated application data is put in the swap que as soon as it is created even if it never gets swapped out. The swap is vital as a place for this data to be kept if needed and has very little to do with the hardware ram and it's paging tables, which are 4 gigs wide even if you have less ram than that. One application (or DOS attack) that goes out of controll and gets caught in a mem allocation loop or something and all your application specific data survives in swap and your system recovers. Without swap your system crashes and all your data and important transaction or whatever is gone forever. It may of course be possible for all swap to be used up but not very likely or even possible for the same lost data results given the fact that even if an application tries to fill up swap it will have to use up ram first and in the process all vital data will be saved in swap before the app begins to use the rest of the swap and therefore only the offending process will crash and not the system.
So, to sum up, the concept behind swap is totally different of the physicall ram, and having tons of ram does not mean that the swap is not going to be used. To check temporary there is no need to make a partition, you can swap to a file, do this in a terminal:
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dd if=/dev/zero of=test.swp bs=1024 count=512000
mkswp test.swp
swapon -v test.swp
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That should give you a 512 mb swap file and activate it (only active untill you reset, this is not permanent). The option of a file could be viable for your concrete situation, because you have tons of memory, but swapping to a file is slower than using a partition.
No if you open top in the same terminal and do some work you will find in a few minutes that, even having free ram, your swap is a bit filled also. That is a basic way to illustrate that "free ram" does not mean "i dont need swap". Very graphic.
The memory management (along with procs states, posix, and the filesystem structure of the os) is one of the basic roots of linux and *nix oss in general. To clear it: can a person live with only an arm? Of course, but the capacities are not the same that if that person had the two arms. |
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Installing Gentoo
