Help, overview for dual boot gentoo/winxp on sata raid0

ciM2pHat4U · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2006 Posts: 2

Hi I would appreciate if anyone with experience with my situation could just provide a quick overview of the things I will need to do to set up Gentoo correctly and quickly, taking into consideration my computer setup:

- My computer uses two SATA hard drives that are set up in RAID-0 by the BIOS.
- WinXP is already installed on my hard drive (ie the two drives which are in RAID-0).
- WinXP is the only operating system that has ever been installed.
- I would like dual boot option, to be able to use either Gentoo or WinXP.
- When using Gentoo, I want to be able to access files like documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc that are already on my hard drive (ie files that were created with WinXP, which I assume are NTFS? don't know if that's right). Also vice versa, so I will be able to access, from WinXP, any documents created in Gentoo.
- My computer has a wire network card and a wireless network card. However, I can only use the wireless card because my computer is physically too far away from my cable modem. The wireless card is D-Link G510 and the wireless router is D-Link DI-524.
- Misc: CPU is Pentium 4 2.8E w/ HT, overclocked to 3.15 ghz. I have prepared a CD of the Gentoo LiveCD 2006.0 installer/boot disc, the one that should allow networkless install. I read somewhere that to configure the wireless network correctly I should use this networkless install?

Anyway, I am totally new to Gentoo and Linux. But I am a technical/computer-oriented person so please feel free to describe any why's and how's.

Thanks in advance!
Ray

Ast0r · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 6:34 am Post subject:

If your disk does not have a free partition with enough space for Gentoo (at least 10GB I would say) then you will need to use a program like PartitionMagic (you should be able to find a torrent to download it if you don't have it). Once you have such a program, you will need to create at least two partitions, one for the root filesystem, and one for swap. The swap should be about twice the size of your physical RAM, unless you have a lot of RAM (anything over a 1GB swap is really overkill). My Gentoo install currently occupies about 29GB (including UT2004 and a bunch of apps), so I would recommend 40GB or so if you can spare it.

Once you have the disk partitioned, note what your partition numbers will be (they count starting at 1). Then follow the Gentoo handbook for the install. It tells you how to go everything, including setting up your bootloader for dual-boot with Windows. You'll have to set the partition types using fdisk in the LiveCD (I believe the install docs go over this).

You will be able to access your Windows stuff from Gentoo, provided that you compile NTFS support into the kernel. Be warned, however, that there is not full write-support for NTFS in the kernel yet. However, the FAT32 write support is excellent. I have a FAT32 partition so that I can exchange files between the OS's. All of my work stuff is on that partition so that I can edit in in both Linux and Windows.

As far as accessing your Linux data in Windows, I know it is possible, but you'll need to select the filesystem type carefully (use ext3 ... not reiser of XFS). You could always install Linux on a FAT32 partition, but I wouldn't recommend it.

If you have any trouble, feel free to post back in this thread; the Gentoo forums are full of friendly people that are willing to help you if you explain your problems.

Keruskerfuerst · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 6:50 am Post subject:

The next problem is the bootlader.
You can´t use grub, since Grub can´t boot a raid 0 Windows partition.
In this case, you should use lilo.

Ast0r · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 7:04 am Post subject:

Keruskerfuerst · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:21 am Post subject:

Just have a look at the grub manual.

ciM2pHat4U · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2006 Posts: 2

Hey thanks for responding. When I use the LiveCD installer, at the step where I am to design my partitions it shows me my two hard drives seperately, as sda and sdb. Is this correct, I mean shouldn't the two hard drives show up as only one big drive since it is in RAID0 at the BIOS level?

I would like to use the default recommended 3 partition setup (boot, swap, root), so should I only do this for sda, or both sda and sdb? Will using only sda physically correspond to using only one hard drive, or will it know to split the setup between both raid0 sata hard drives?

Also, at this step it doesn't show me any portions of my hard drives that are already used (such as the existing windows). If I choose the recommended partition setup, will that be erasing/overwriting existing WinXP or other data?

cyrillic · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 11:21 pm Post subject:

LoSeR_5150 · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 8:21 am Post subject:

I hate to say this but why does grub not boot Raid O Winxp ??? I have two 80 Gb 's running raid 0 with Gentoo and WinXP Anyways .... I am using dmraid w/ gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r8 until a new dmraid that is compatible with 2.16+ kernels is in portage. Anyways for ur install u can use partition magic as suggested but if u could it would be much better to just throw a livecd in.... boot it with dodmraid option, then fdisk /dev/mapper/yourraidarray create a boot(type 83) partition, then a ntfs partition(type 7) for windows as there is no need to use fat32 since there is full read/write support for NTFS built into the kernel if u so desire, then a root(type83) and swap(type82) for linux. after that u reboot and install winxp like normal. then when that is finished u pop ur live cd back in and install gentoo the only difference will be ur grub.conf and kernel setup. I'm using genkernel --menuconfig --dmraid --gensplash=livecd-2006.0 so i can set my kernel options manually as well as get a framebuffer splash as well as dmraid in my initrd there is a great guide on how to install fake hardware raid (onboard raid controllers) with a dual boot setup on gentoo-wiki.com under the howto section. I'll post my grub.conf and fstab so u will have an idea of what yours will need to look like. Cheers

grub.conf