Filesystem partition help needed

[crusader]

Hi All,

I am yet to install Gentoo in my laptop. Before launching installation, I would like to clear some of my doubts:

1. Currently my laptop has Win NT 4.0 configured (Pentium III, 600 MHz, 256MB RAM) and filesystem is as follows:
C :- FAT32
D :- NTFS
E :- NTFS

Since, I have some preloaded applications in my C dir, I would like to install Gentoo in other dir ( D or E ). I have partition magic 5.x installed. So, my question is,

1.a) Can Gentoo be installed in other dir( D or E ) than my primary dir ( C )?
1.b) As I am going to strictly adhere to gentoo installation docs, is it easier to partition first using Partition magic or follow as in gentoo installation docs to create partition and filesystems?

2. Does installation in laptop needs anymore additional steps other than what has covered in Gentoo installation docs (x86) ?

3. Can anyone help me with a sample filesystem partition steps?.


Any help would greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

[tukem]

1a) Talking about windows drives C, D, E really makes no sense when you have to create a partition anyway. Do you have any room on your harddrive, if not you have to resize existing partitions to make some room.

1b) To my knowledge Partition Magic still can't handle all linux filesystems (like XFS) but if you only use filesystems it can create I see no problem in using it. Personally I would only use it for creation of partitions because it's not as flexible as command line. Just make sure you start using correct partitions or you will lose your windows partitions. This is quickly checked with fdisk.

fdisk /dev/hdX where X is drive letter
[In fdisk] p show partition table
[In fdisk] q exit fdisk

fdisk shows HPFS/NTFS for your NTFS partitions and Win95 FAT32 for FAT32 partition so you can easily avoid them.

2) Try searching these forums for your laptop. Some laptops work easier while some require more work. Search also for "laptop" and "notebook" to find out what kind of problems people with laptops generally have. (No need to read all thousand threads )

3) I couldn't quite understand what kind of answer you were looking for in this question

[arkhan_jg]

First rule when playing with partitions; backup ANYTHING you might want of that drive if it gets borked. I mean it!

Partition magic is fine to create the partitions with, especially current versions (it.s up to version 8), but i don't think it can handle anything other than swap, ext2 and ext3 partitions.

Assuming you don't want your D and E partitions, you can use partition magic to delete them. How you set up your gentoo partitions after that is flexible. Personally, i'd probably create a small ~50Mb primary partition, ext2 (which will be boot), then create a extended partition filling the remaining drive space. (Hopefully >2Gb) - in that extended partition create a 250-500Mb swap partition (i usually go with 500Mb, but if you have less space, you can go smaller), and finally, create an logical ext2 partition to fill up the remaining space, that will be your / partition.

You can then follow through from about 6.14 in the install guide, though the previous stuff is probably worth reading (Note, that you can make those ext2 partitions partition magic created anything you like, like reiserfs or ext3). I personally recommend using cfdisk rather than fdisk on the gentoo partition, it's a lot easier to use.

Just be VERY careful when you do the partition operations - your drive partitions WILL be different to those in the install guide.

In the example setup I gave above, /dev/hda1 would be your windows partition (DON'T erase that), /dev/hda2 would be your boot partition, /dev/hda5 would be your swap, and /dev/hda6 would be your root partition. The advantage of using the extended partition is that you can have lots of logical partitions - you can only have 4 primary partitions.

This FAQ would be a useful read methinks: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=10588


And something like this, http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4269/1/
would be useful background material on how partition handling differs between windows and linux.
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