Kenneth Geddings Jr. wrote:
i want to set up my hard drive to have three partitions one is the windows xp home partition, one will be my main Linux partition (for fedora core ) and the other will be a testing ground partition so i can test out latest fedora core tests and or try out other Linux distributions with it. i am going to use the mandrake installer to format and resize my hardrive but what should i set the two Linux partitions as what file system? and will it be easy to delete and overwrite a Linux partition that i will use for testing? thanks Kenneth Geddings Jr. Associate Member Free Software Foundation www.fsf.org
I'm not sure if you've already set up Windows, but the best way to do things, starting from a clean drive, is to install Windows first, specifying the desired size for the Windows partition with the Windows installer and leaving the rest of the drive alone. Once Windows is installed, start the Fedora Core installation. Manually partition the rest of the disk to your liking. You'll at least want a root partition ( / mount point, ext3 filesystem) for each Linux installation and a swap partition (has no mount point, 'swap' format) that the Linux installations may share. Your swap partition should probably at least match your RAM in size. Many people further subdivide the drive, that's a matter of preference. Once Fedora Core is installed, you'll be able to choose between Fedora Core and Windows (labelled 'Other' by default) using the Grub bootloader. If you want read-write access to your Windows partition under Linux, you'll need to use the FAT32 format when installing it. Support in Linux for NTFS is incomplete. There are projects to allow read-write access to ext3 partitions from within Windows, but I can't name any off the top of my head, nor do I recommend giving read-write access to your Linux partition to something as untrustworthy as Windows. After installing other distributions, it may be necessary to alter your bootloader configuration in order to boot everything. I recommend using Grub from Fedora Core as your bootloader, configuring it for any other operating systems you install. I'm not biased, it just works well. You should probably create a Grub boot disk to keep handy in case your boot record is overwritten. -Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes nman64@xxxxxxxxx
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