FC10 dual boot on new XP machine, partitioning

[Jerry Feldman]

On 12/07/2008 04:20 PM, tns1 wrote:
> Dell 1525 laptop
>
> This new PC has the following primary partions:
> A fat16 partition of about 40MB (EISA configuration)
> A ntfs partition of around 280GB (XP system)
> An extended partition containing a fat32 partition of 2.5GB (MediaDirect)
> A fat32 partition of 10GB (DellRestore)
>
> Some of these are unfamiliar so I don't know if there are any 
> restrictions on moving/resizing them.
> If I keep them, it seems like I'd have to more shuffling than I have 
> done before if I am going to add the ususal
> boot, /, swap, particularly if boot needs to be a primary, and I'd 
> also guess that the EISA partition needs to be
> primary and stay in the first 1024 cyls much like boot. The system 
> still needs to preserve its original system restore
> and media direct functionality.
>
> I did give the FC10 installer a try, but it is not up to the task of 
> automatically resizing and moving partitions, so
> I am using gparted on a Knoppix CD to do the heavy lifting.
>
> 1) Does anyone know what restrictions there are on moving/resizing the 
> existing partitions above?
> 2) What would be the simplest workable partitioning for dual boot?
I generally run several linux installfest per year. The way I set up 
dual boot is:
1. resize the existing Windows XP.  (partition 1) NTFS
2. Sometimes Windows uses a second partition. That can be resized also.
3. The next physical partition I set up as extended, and use the rest 
for Linux:
    1. Swap - 2 or 3X memory.
    2. Root - maybe 10 - 20 GB
   3. Home - any size you need

In your specific case, I would let the Fedora partitioner allocate the 
root and home partitions. You would probably need to reduce the size of 
the XP partition.  Neither /boot nor swap need to be primary.  In the 
past on my old system, partition 1 was always the extended and 
everything was a logical partition. The reason for /boot to be a 
separate partition is that the MBR needs to be able to point directly to 
the stage2 in /boot, and on large drives you want to make sure it is 
somewhat close to the beginning. I don't recall the number of cylinders 
off hand.

Another thing that I am recommending for new multi-core systems is not 
to resize at all, but to use virtualization so you can have both Windows 
and Linux running at the same time. I have Windows XP Professional and 
Windows Vista Ultimate running under KVM/QEMU on my desktop with Windows 
XP Professional as the guest OS on my laptop under Virtualbox.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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