Partitioning tools
Moderator: Edi
Partitioning tools
What tool can/should I use to partition a hard drive, I'm starting from scratch, I want to make one 100GB partition for windows 2000 or XP, and another 20GB partition for linux, is there one I can use where I boot it from a floppy (I know I can with FDISK, can I with FIPS, or partition magic?) make the partitions, them slap down the OS's into them.
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Darth Wong
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Just create a 100GB partition when you install Windows (Win2k has a built-in partitioning routine) and leave the remaining 20GB unpartitioned. When you install Linux (assuming you install a distro with a decent installer routine), tell it to use the unpartitioned 20GB space. It will take care of everything else and install a boot loader (LILO or GRUB) to let you switch. Just remember to keep a boot floppy in case you wipe out the boot sector and nuke the boot loader, so you can get back into Linux and reinstall the boot loader if you have to.
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There's partition resizer- which is free and is slightly more user-friendly then FIPS.
I suggest 20GB Linux, 20GB XP/2k NTFS, and 4 20GB FAT32 partitions that you can share between OSes- if your linux partition gets full, you can nuke one of the empty FAT32 partitions and convert it to Ext3. Same goes for Windows. I don't know if you can use dynamic disks w/ windows. Linux also has it's own dynamic disk equivelant. If you do not want to nuke partitions, then you can add loopback files to provide space as needed for Linux. Note that the installing loopback devices/nuking FAT32 partitions is only if you need space for programs, since Linux can write to FAT32 also- however it's suggested to limit the permissions on these drives, so you can't run programs off of them.
Or you could have the 2 20GB OS-specific partitions and one big 80GB FAT32, but that's inefficient, since FAT does not work well with large partitions.
You probably don't need that much space for linux programs, so you can just keep those 4 FAT32 partitions to keep your MP3s and videos on.
How will you use all that space? I only have a 6GB hard drive...
I suggest 20GB Linux, 20GB XP/2k NTFS, and 4 20GB FAT32 partitions that you can share between OSes- if your linux partition gets full, you can nuke one of the empty FAT32 partitions and convert it to Ext3. Same goes for Windows. I don't know if you can use dynamic disks w/ windows. Linux also has it's own dynamic disk equivelant. If you do not want to nuke partitions, then you can add loopback files to provide space as needed for Linux. Note that the installing loopback devices/nuking FAT32 partitions is only if you need space for programs, since Linux can write to FAT32 also- however it's suggested to limit the permissions on these drives, so you can't run programs off of them.
Or you could have the 2 20GB OS-specific partitions and one big 80GB FAT32, but that's inefficient, since FAT does not work well with large partitions.
You probably don't need that much space for linux programs, so you can just keep those 4 FAT32 partitions to keep your MP3s and videos on.
How will you use all that space? I only have a 6GB hard drive...
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