Get help on partitioning here [Part 2]

Sakkath · Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:36 am Post subject:

The install guide's default partition scheme has /boot at 32M, and that's what I use, and it works fine.

GoLoGo · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2006 Posts: 14

I currently have 2 Hardrives -
On the Primary IDE I have :
1 20GB WD HD with Windows XP Pro SP2
1 200GB WD HD - Partitioned in half i.e 100GB & 100GB - the First parition is for programs and anything else I might need, the second partition is for File Archieves I like to have.

I want to install Gentoo, but I do not want to remove my current windows Installation on the First Hardrive.
How would I come about to install the network native Gentoo Installation and keep my current OS intact.

AMD64
2GB DDR400 RAM
A partition scheme and how would I install it, and be able to choose the OS at start would be nice.
Any help is appreciated and thank you in advanced.

VinzC · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 11:47 am Post subject:

You'll have to reserve 10-30 GB for Linux, depending on your needs. If you want Gnome, OpenOffice, KDE, games you'll need bigger spaces. Reserve 4-5 GB for compiling OpenOffice (on /var/tmp). I suggest you either delete one of your partitions on your second drive or reduce one and make 10-30 GB available.

If you want to resize a partition, I recommend Gparted. I'd also recommend using Volume Groups as they provide a very flexible solution for resizing logical volumes on the fly (especially with ReiserFS). For instance I've just extended my /var filesystem with 1GB without unmounting it!

I have a 12 GB FAT space for exchanging data between Windows and Linux. I've also put Windows on a 13 GB partition. But I recon this can become a bit short if you want to install games, given also the lot of space that is wasted in Windows for caching system files multiple times... So keep your Windows disk intact.

You'll have to install Grub on your first (or primary disk) preferably on the MBR. GRUB will become your master boot loader and then be able to start Windows or Linux.

Hope this helps.
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GoLoGo · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2006 Posts: 14

When I reach the prompt, I check the first disk... the one with the windows installation... 20.9 GB NTFS everything is fine. type q to get out of there. Now when I check my second HD, the 200GB one. I do fdisk /dev/hda1 then I press 'p' to print out the partition table. Now it shows me 4 partitions when I only have two, says the system is unknown for all those partitions... and the blocks and sectors and what not are all messed up. Also it detects it at 20GB when clearly the number of cylenders it has, shows that it is a 200GB HD. Any thoughts? I currently have data on the first partition about 40GB worth... I cant format the whole hardrive, because it seems like the partitions are messed up, but it works fine on Windows. Any ideas on what would be the next step to try and have installable partitions?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:16 pm Post subject:

GoLoGo,

Welcome to Gentoo.

You said

GoLoGo · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2006 Posts: 14

Alright thank you, I know this might not be the place for it.... but I want to break up the second partition of 100GB on the 200GB HD. I want to have open office.org run pvpgn(gaming server), ventrilo, and have many c++ development tools, and other multimedia stuff. What would be a good scheme, my system specs are:

AMD64 3200+
2GB DDR400 Dual-Channel
7800GT OC BG Nvidia

considering that im using my second hardrive /dev/hdb. I would be formatting a partition into little pieces. Any help is appreciated and thank you in advanced.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 8:33 pm Post subject:

GoLoGo,

You cannot partition a partition further but you can delete a partition and create many small ones in its place.
Deleteing a partition destroys all the data on it - be careful.

There is a problem with partitions on the PC. The partition table on the MBR can contain at most, four partitions.
These are called primary partitions. One of these partitions may be an extended partition. This is simply a container for more partitions. The partitions inside an extended partition are called logical partitions.

Partitions 1..4 are the primary partitions, on SATA/SCSI 5..15 are logical partitions, on IDE, its 5..63
If you already have an extended partition, you may not have another one.

This mess has come about because of the way the PC has develped over the years.

Post the output of

mark_alec · Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 7:08 am Post subject:

Merged above four posts.

gledis · Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 10:43 pm Post subject: 37Gb HELP to divide

Hi everyone.
My laptop has 37Gb. I need to take my Win partition (university apps

So my table should be:

runningmaniac · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 6 Location: Tennessee

Hello All,
Hopefully this hasn't been brought up before, but here goes. I have a pretty new AMD64 machine that has a 300GB harddrive and Windows XP Pro. 300 GB was way more than i needed for windows, so I left about 130GB unpartitoned and now I want to install Gentoo on it. However, my Windows section is divided into a 60GB C drive, a 100GB D drive for games, and a 10GB E Drive for my Norton GoBack files. The problem is that QTParted, Fdisk, CFdisk, etc.. all view my windows drives as ONE 170 GB partition (the whole portion used by the 3 windows "drives") with a type of "44 - Unknown" instead of NTFS. I can mount /dev/hda1 using "mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/C" but it only mounts the 60GB from my C: drive and the D and E drives arent even showing up to Linux. I went ahead and wrote a new partition table using Fdisk with space for boot, swap, and root but when i rebooted windows, I had a totally messed up D: Drive (it was unformatted and showed up as 2.5GB instead of 100GB) but a working E: drive. I went back to Gentoo LiveCD and removed the linux paritions i had added and everything went back to normal. I'm pretty sure that the parititions I wrote with Fdisk were AFTER the 160GB that is taken up by Windows, soooo...

Is there some way to write to the parition table using Fdisk without messing up my windows partitions?
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VinzC · Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 1:52 pm Post subject:

@runningmaniac

It looks like you've gone through the maze of Windows Logical Disk Management :-)

. You need kernel support for WINDOWS_LDM_PARTITION if you want to be able to "see" partitions made by Windows 2000 and above. By changing your partition table you probably messed up with Windows partition table. I strongly suggest you backed up your data and repair your Windows partitions using M$ fixmbr and fixboot a/o chkdsk utilities - one never knows.

In Linux Windows LDM support is available in your kernel menu File Systems > Partition Types > Windows Logical Disk Manager (Dynamic Disk) support.

Now I don't know why you don't see your Windows dynamic disks from your LiveCD. Anyway you didn't tell us which LiveCD version you have. I think you'll see them with recent LiveCD such as 2005.1 or 2006.0. You can check it and type zgrep -i ldm /proc/config.gz:

runningmaniac · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 6 Location: Tennessee

VinzC,

Thanks for the reply. Im using the 2005.1 rc-1 version of Gentoo LiveCd, and my output from the zgrep command you gave me was the same as your example:

runningmaniac · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 6 Location: Tennessee

Negative, I ran into exactly the same problems with the 2006.0 disk. Im tempted to just wipe out windows and re-install it on one partition. Cant live with it, cant live without it...

Post if you know anything else i can try. Thanks guys.
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VinzC · Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2006 9:57 am Post subject:

One thing you could do is make sure your Windows "disks" are in fact Dynamic Disks using Disk Management snap-in. They'll be reported as "Basic disk" or "Dynamic disk". To run fixmbr and fixboot you must boot from XP CD, select recovery console.

Otherwise I suggest you used ordinary partitions for your Windows data, just in case you want to reinstall everything. I'm not convinced you'll need that. IMHO leave your Windows partition intact and move the other two. You can do that from Windows Disk Management snap-in, I think.
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runningmaniac · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 6 Location: Tennessee

LOL wow... I booted with the Windows XP cd and went to recovery console. I used fixmbr and fixboot in that order. While i was in the recovery console I started the DISKPART utility, which is similar to Cfdisk in Linux. This utility ALSO shows just one single NTFS partition that takes up 157GB, instead of my three. Now when I reboot to let Windows load i get this:

runningmaniac · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 6 Location: Tennessee

alright! After a long day of working on this I finally have my machine dual-booting between Windows XP Pro and a base Gentoo install using Grub. Victory!!!!
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drvik · Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 7:32 am Post subject:

Hi guys,

Read the whole partitioning threads and would like to get people's opinions on my proposed setup. I am setting up a general workstation (internet, email, openoffice, wine) and a MythTV backend server + editing video streams and burning DVDs.... I recently purchased 2x500Gb hard drives initially with the view of striping those into 1 terabyte of storage that I intended to partition into windows, /boot, swap and /

After a bit more reading I'm a tad nervous about running a striped system since the onboard RAID controllers are only software (NF4 and Sil3114) and I'll lose the whole system if something should go wrong with the array....

Do I need to worry about LVM2 since I have so much storage???

Here's what I have in mind currently...

Drive 1
---------
32Mb /boot
1Gb swap
20Gb / (Reiser4)
400+Gb /mnt/mythtv_storage (XFS)
10Gb Windows

Drive 2
---------
500Gb /mnt/mythtv_storage (XFS)

I should also mention that I intend to recycle my largest drive (160Gb) and link it externally as NAS and place my /home there (all documents, MP3s, Firefox settings etc) that way I can access them when I dual boot as well as from my wireless laptop....

Can 2 partitions both have the same mount point??? If so, how does the OS allocate which files get written to where?

drvik

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 2:04 pm Post subject:

drvik,

I would not use XFS or Reiser4 unless you have a UPS and know you will always have a clean shutdown.
ext3 is plenty good enogh and there is a good change of fixing it when it breaks. Of course, it you have all this data backed up, you can restore breom backups.

If you mount two partitions at the same mount point, you will only be able to see and work with the most recently mounted partition. Any other partitions mounted there will become hidden, like the layers in an onioin. Its all harmless to your data.

I would (do) use kernel raid0 and put windows somewhere else. The sofware raid provided by the motherboard controllers is not very mature and I have seen reports of data rate issues with the nForce 4 software raid. I have no idea if this is a driver or BIOS issue though. Kernel raid and BIOS raid are not compatible. Windows can only understand BIOS raid.

Hmm, 2x 500Gb in Linear Raid for 1Tb of NAT - That sounds really good
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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janskey · n00b Joined: 13 May 2006 Posts: 74

Hi Guru's,

I was wondering about ideal disk partitioning, i'm just new to linux and i use to be a FreeBSD user.. i read a lot of books and articles that separating the /, swap, /var, /tmp, /home and /usr. i dont know also which one is 1st and the last.?any advice!

janskey

at240 · l33t Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 603 Location: UK

This is a very common request. Have a look at this sticky thread:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-420242-start-0-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-.html

PsychoticRetina · Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 9:19 am Post subject:

dont think there is such a thing as ideal layout for everyone.
swap has to be on its own partition. keep /home separate - if/when you reinstall, things will be much easier. /var should be separate i think due to the abundance of rw operations and ensuing fragmentation. some prefer a separate /boot, apparently thats debatable (what isnt? ; )) generally, more partitions means less fragmentation over time + better security. the trick is to know how much space to assign to each, which is difficult if you dont have much experiance/your expectations are ill-defined.
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at240 · l33t Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 603 Location: UK

janskey · n00b Joined: 13 May 2006 Posts: 74

PsychoticRetina · Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 10:08 am Post subject:

forget about 4 GB for swap. the advice "swap should = ram x 2" stems from old times and in reality only applies if you have fairly little memory. 512 MB for swap should be sufficient, you probably want see even half of that actually used...
remember, linux is much more nice to swap than windows is.
your /var looks a little bit large to me, but im not sure on this one.
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