Dumb partitioning question

[3nigma]

I just wanted to ask a question in lieu of a previous failure to properly partition my drive, and wanted to ask before I cemented any changes...

I have a 200gb hd, which was partitioned
20gb - C
180 - D

I used partition magic to create a ext3 filesystem on some of the free space on D. I then installed suse 9.1 Linux. Then whenever I tried booting to windows, i got the

root(hd0,0)
chainloader +1

error message. I read the articles on how to fix it, nothing really helped, and in the end I backed up all my important stuff to another hd, and reformatted it. I now have:

15Gb - C (Windows NTFS)
100GB - D (RAW)
85GB - Unformatted

I was wondering how I should finish partitioning this drive to run 1, maybe even 2 different distros of linux alongside windows. Another problem I ran into before with SUSE was I couldnt change files in any way on the C or D drive (Both were NTFS), and I think that was an NTFS problem. And if you let a linux distro partition it, it creates a million partitions, and I'm not quite sure what they do.. i.e. a /root/ partition and a bunch of little swap file partitions. Are all those necessary? What are those?

Sorry if my questions seem stupid...

[LoserWithCause]

ok you only really need 2 partitions with linux. one will be your "/" which should have enough space to install the distro on and store files that you have (programs,pics,etc.) That should be ext3. Your other partition should be your "swap" which should be about 500megabytes. It should be "swap" formatted. If you want to access data on the ntfs partitions you'll need to configure samba which is a whole nother story I think you need one "/" partition and one "swap" partition for every distro that you install. I would also reccomend that GRUB bootloader rather than LILO.

[3nigma]

So... this would work?

C - 15GB Windows (NTFS)
D - 100GB Music, Video, Data Backup (Fat32 for accessibility?)
E - 500MB linux swap (probably a hidden partition?)
F - 20 GB Linux (Probably SuSE 9.1, with the parted driver update CD, so the same thing doesn't happen again.)

and that leaves about... 64.5GB free for perhaps another swap file & linux installation...

[Stormblazer]

Sounds good. I have a similar setup although with 2 HDs, an 80GB and a 160GB.
80GB: 1st partition: Windows XP (NTFS, 20GB)
2nd partition: Fedora Core 3 (EXT3, 26GB)
3rd partition: SWAP (1GB)
<remaining space unpartitioned, planning on installing gentoo>
160GB: 1st partition: my main data drive (FAT32, 154GB)
2nd partition: for random linux stuff (EXT3, 6GB)
I also have an 8GB SCSI drive (FAT32) that I plan on reformatting and creating the SWAP partition on it instead, because SCSI is a lot faster. The huge 156GB partition is for housing OS-independant data, and all my downloads (i watch anime, so i need a *lot* of space for the video files).

A note about all the partitions the Linux installer made:
Linux has a base tree of folders that's very similar on all distros. /root is the home folder for the admin level user (root), /home is for user home folders, /boot is where the kernel image and initial ram disk images go (for booting the system), etc.
/ itself is the root of the system, and everything else is mounted under it. So, it's possible to place all the folders within a single partition, just select custom disk partitioning in the installer and make a '/' partition and a SWAP partition. The SWAP partition is like virtual memory in windows, and should be at least equal to your RAM (if you have less than or equal to 256MB of RAM, I reccomend making the SWAP partition at least double your RAM).

Another thing: Only one SWAP partition is needed for linux, no matter how many distros you use because all distros can use the swap partition, it's not specific to the distro you installed it with.

[LoserWithCause]

yeah, i was wrong about that swap thing, you do only need one...

[valan]

root(hd0,0)
chainloader +1

That's no error message

It's just grub telling you that it's booting the first partition on the first drive with the chainloader. Normal stuff.

[3nigma]

the actual error message was more like
hd(0,0)
Filesystem type unknown
Partition Type 0x7
chainloader +1

Fixed it now. Theres a patch you have to burn to a cd or floppy and use during installation. Working on getting 9.2 professional, and I dont think the parted command messes up the windows partition in later revisions. I think the document said Kernel 2.6