Hey all.
Windows ME (point and laugh at me if you want to) has been getting increasingly flakey on me recently, and rather than dump a hundred plus bucks on XP, I’ve decided to give RedHat 8.0 a shot. My boxed package should be here in the next couple of days ($36.99 + free shipping on Amazon… score!)
My background: I can SSH into my webhost to do mysqldumps and gzipping. That’s the extent of my experience with Linux.
I’ve been doing some preemptive homework, and I’m getting stuck on the partitioning that will apparently happen during the RH install.
Can somebody explain what my optimal partition setup should be? ME is currently taking up ~7GB of my 20GB hd. A lot of that is MP3s and big TIFF files, which I’d like to be able to share between OSes.
If I eventually decide to go full bore with RH, keeping ME only for emergenicies, can I adjust the various partition sizes at some point in the future without having to wipe everything and start over?
What specific settings/filesystems should I set the partitions at?
Should I even be worrying about this, or with the RH installation wizard take care of everything for me?
If there are any other questions you think I should have asked, please consider your advice solicited. Remember, I’m new to the revolution thing.
Thanks.
I will be silent on the topic of how to optimally partition your drive. That’s too close to a matter of opinion.
I will point out that your RH install can read FAT32, which is what your copy of ME almost undoubtedly has your drive partitioned as.
So… the copy of RedHat should be able to mount your FAT32 partition on its filesystem, and thus you will have access to your favorite music.
I would like to point out that “splitting” partitions using whatever tool usually works, however there is danger involved. If you have the scratch, you may wish to buy a separate drive to install Linux onto.
Some of my friends have lost their entire drive contents when splitting partitions using “Partition Magic.”
While you rebuild your file system setup, I strongly encourage you to have your PC connected to a UPS. If your power were to go out at any point during this process you will likely lose data on the partitions being re-sized at the time.
I suggest performing smart backups before you fiddle with this.
Optimal partitioning is definitely a Religious Issue - I like lots of optimally sized partitions for safety, other people will say that overpartitioning always simultateously wastes and starves filesystem space. I dunno for sure, but Red Hat 8.0 should include lvm, which is a tool designed to make disk organization a little more flexible - if it’s not included, you can grab it from here. I’ve never had to use lvm myself, so I can’t help much further than that. Always backup data before overwriting it - at least the things you can’t afford to lose.
Optimal partitioning is definitely a Religious Issue - I like lots of optimally sized partitions for safety, other people will say that overpartitioning always simultateously wastes and starves filesystem space. I dunno for sure, but Red Hat 8.0 should include lvm, which is a tool designed to make disk organization a little more flexible - if it’s not included, you can grab it from here. I’ve never had to use lvm myself, so I can’t help much further than that. Always backup data before overwriting it - at least the things you can’t afford to lose.
I guess I shoulda clarified… this is a notebook, so I’m stuck with the 20GB drive until I’m ready to swing the jack for an upgrade.
So Linux will be able to read directly from the ME partition, as long as I mount it correctly?
Thanks again for the tips.
BOO-YA
Got it in the mail yesterday, and managed to install today.
Hint to other n00bs: Read the manual. I kept getting stuck on the fact that Disk Druid wasn’t seeing the free space on my Windows partition to mount the root partition on. I eventually stumbled across fips, which you need to run off a boot disk to split up your HD. D’oh. After I got everything installed, mounting the FAT partition was cake.
Now for my winmodem. That is gonna suck…
Thanks y’all.