installation questions

chynk · n00b Joined: 15 Oct 2003 Posts: 5

i recently d/led gentoo for p4 and i burned tha images on cds. all was good until i needed to partition my hdd. i currently run winXP on a 60GB NTFS hdd on my laptop.

is it possible to run gentoo on the same hdd? i dont want to format it either, is that possible? any help would be much appreciated.

thanks in advance.

Smoke2firE · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 8:40 pm Post subject:

well if theres no free space on the 60 gig then youll have to use something like partition magic to resize the partition and free up some room. if you go this route be shure to DEFRAG the drive first then leave the space empty youll probably wanna leave atleast 5GB to install gentoo so free up enought space on the drive for that with partition magic :wink:

you might wanna try something like knoppix live linux cd to try linux out first before you commit to this

chynk · n00b Joined: 15 Oct 2003 Posts: 5

thanks for tha reply

my hdd has got 20+GB free so that aint a problem. how do i create tha partitions?

Smoke2firE · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 9:07 pm Post subject:

if you mean theres 20 gigs free showing in windows then youre still gonna need to use partition magic and make the windows partition smaller
dont forget to DEFRAG it first

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

print this sucker out itll walk you through it :wink:

the whole install

Earthwings · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 9:08 pm Post subject:

s/tha/the/

creating partitions is done with cfdisk or fdisk and is described in detail in the install guide. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

Smoke2firE · Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2003 9:12 pm Post subject:

but you cant hijack 20 gigs from a windows partition with fdisk or cfdisk sorry aint happenin :wink:

hes probably seing 20 gigs free in windows if hes never made partitions before i doubt hes got a open partition :cry:

chynk · n00b Joined: 15 Oct 2003 Posts: 5

aight this is wat i did... i reformated n partitioned

10 GB for winXP (NTFS)
10 GB for gentoo (FAT32)
40 GB for misc (NTFS)

now how do i intall gentoo on the 10GB partition?

Pluvius · Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2003 10:54 pm Post subject:

As stated before, follow the installation guide on the Gentoo site. It walks you step-by-step through the process. It will also show you how to partition your FAT32 (evil Windows file system) for Gentoo. Linux tends to use file systems like Reiser, EXT2 and EXT3. You can read up on them. I would recommend using a journalized file system.

Pluvius

ewan.paton · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2003 7:32 pm Post subject:

if you want to have 2 windows partitions and gentoo (like me) i would use this type of partitioning

there are 2 types of partition logical and extended logical can only have four so you will have to create a logical partition to house the extended partitions

hda1 10gig NTFS logical
hda2 40gig FAT32 logical
hda3 the logigal extended partition thing
hda5 100meg ext2 extended
hda6 500meg swap extended
hda7 9.4gig reiser extended

then use them for the following

hda1 windows system & programs better than fat32 can only be mounted read-only to linux
hda2 i assume this will be for movies, mp3s etc i wouldnt have anything important on this like windows programs as FAT32 is slow,crap but it can be mounted as read write under linux to give you acces to all your files and lets your linux system have much more disk space
hda5 /boot
hda6 /swap
hda7 / i like reiser but there are plenty others

an explanation of how file systems work can be found at http://www.namesys.com/ if you get interested like i did when i was starting out but you can start to feel dumb really quickly sufficed to say the filesystem choices you make can be pretty important latter on you may want to try a LVM