Partitioning Drive

[Nixforce]

I have a Athlon 2500 with 2 HDD, one is a 70gb and the other is a 120GB. the 70 has XP on it.. I would like to split the 120GB to add linux distros (Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, Redhat, Debian).. How should i partition the drive to do this, would also like a partition that all OS (including XP) can get to to share..

[josolanes]

I have a Athlon 2500 with 2 HDD, one is a 70gb and the other is a 120GB. the 70 has XP on it.. I would like to split the 120GB to add linux distros (Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, Redhat, Debian).. How should i partition the drive to do this, would also like a partition that all OS (including XP) can get to to share..

i would say that you want one fat32 partition (so all os's can see/use it) and one swap file. then separate partitions for each linux distro

then you would be able to share files between any of the distros and windows using the fat32 partition and all of the distros can use the same swap file

[Nixforce]

Hi,

In what order should i install the OS's, and create the partitions...Ive never install a Linux Distro (except Corel Linux and smoothwall).. Where can i get instructions or guidelines to do this?

[greenpenguin]

Delete windows and use the both hard drives
Errr...
Partition with Mandriva, it's easiest

[borromini]

I suggest you go with Knoppix. You can also boot your first distro you want to install (it doesn't matter in which sequence you install them, but I suggest they must at least be able to use the same boot loader!), and partition from there (for example from CLI with cfdisk, which is quite handy.

Swap should be twice your RAM (unless you have 512 or more, then you can cancel the swap space). Take some 15 Gb for each distro.

[Nixforce]

I have added the second HDD to the pc, so my primary is 70G with XP Pro, the second is a 200GB as a secondary which is blank at the moment. How can i start from here?

[a thing]

Whichever drive is the master drive (probably C: in windowz), instal GRUB to the MBR of that and put a 1GB /boot partition there. On the other have a ohh 5GB /home partition (where all the configuration for programs will be stored so you don't need to reconfigure every distro), whatever for /usr/local (where you should install new programs so you can use them on every distro), whatever FAT32/vfat for your all-OS files and the rest for GNU/Linux distros. You shouldn't have a FAT32 /home partition because NTFS and FAT32 suck so bad it doesn't support symlinks (which are just links to another file or directory).