On Friday 2 May 2008, 18:41, Mark Knecht wrote: > Data: > > 80GB hard drive > 2GB DRAM > > Questions: > > 1) What's the recommended order to install dual boot today. I prefer > to go Gentoo first, XP second. Any issues?
Yes. XP will blow away the MBR and replace it with its own MBR, so, to be able to boot linux again, you'll have to boot with a livecd, chroot, and re-install grub (or lilo). On the other hand, if you install windows first, and linux last, you will have no problems when you'll have to configure grub: just add another entry for booting a non-linux OS. > 2) What recommendations do folks have about splitting an 80GB drive > up. I'm thinking of maybe 50-60GB for Gentoo, followed by Win XP using > 20-30GB at the end of the drive. Partitions? I'm considering: > > sda1 -> /boot = 50MB > sda2 -> swap (unsure whether I should dedicate 4GB to this. That's 5% > of my drive and I won't likely ever use all of 2GB or RAM.) > sda3 -> /var = 2GB > sda4 ==extended > sda5 -> / balance of Linux side, say 55GB > sda6 == Windows drive C: > > Any and all comments and ideas welcomed. Any particular reason to put windows at the end of the drive? This should however not be a problem, it you partition the space at the beginning of the disk *before* installing XP (eg, doing (c)fdisk from a livecd). On my laptop, I partitioned as follows: hda1 -> windows (23GB) hda2 -> extended hda5 -> /boot (50MB) hda6 -> swap (2GB) hda7 -> /home (45GB) hda8 -> / (remaining space, ~10GB) I don't need a separate /var. Do you have special requirements to keep it separated? On the other hand, I like to use a dedicated partition for /home. This is useful because you can share your home folder among different distros (in case you have more than one installed), and, more important, if you need you can wipe / and reinstall without touching /home (probably saving /etc and something else beforehand if you want...but still quicker than backing up several GB of data, which you are forced to do if you have /home on /). -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
