Partition Help Needed

[adrenjoky]

hi this is my first linux install so bear with me.

i'm trying to configure a dual boot setup between xp and suse 10.1, i have 4gb/s of dual channel ram and a dual core pentium D 64bit processor, with 660gb of hd space. i want both of the OS systems to have read/write capabilitys to the same partition (vfat). whats the sizes of the partions needed? heres what i have came up with so far...

PRIMARY PARTITION (XP OS) 100GB
EXTENDED PARTITION (VFAT) ?GB
PRIMARY PARTITION (/) ?GB
(/USR) ?GB
PRIMARY PARTITON (SWAP) 2GB
(SWAP) 2GB
(SWAP) 2GB
(SWAP) 2GB

SINCE I'M TRYING TO MAKE IT SO THAT BOTH OS'S READ AND WRITE TO THE SAME LOCATION, WOULD THAT MEAN THAT /USR AND VFAT ARE THE SAME THING, THAT THE /USR PARTITION SHOULD TAKE UP THE REST OF THE DISK SPACE AND BE VFAT FILE FORMAT, BASICLY TO COMBINE THEM? ANY HELP ANYONE HAS TO SHARE WOULD BE REALLY APPRECIATED!!

[scanER]

download partion magic for DOS or hirens boot CD from the pirate Bay which has lots of tools for partioning etc........

you only need 4 partitions

HPFS/NTFS
linux FS
linux SWAP
extended<----------both OS's cant r-w to this partition

P.S
i advise
u to use NTLDR as your bootmanger using Bootpart
this saves messin in unfamiliar OS's
i think thats allz u need to do

[rameshwar]

Hai,
To install a dual boot with WIN XP and linux,

PRIMARY
one NTFS / VFAT partition with XP
one "/" partition
one SWAP partition is enough. ( double the size of ram but not exceeding Max of 2 GB )

EXTENDED
you can have any number of VFAT/NTFS/LINUX partitions

Alternatively, you can have seperate partitions for /usr, /usr/local, /var, /tmp, /home etc. But, all that you install in linux during installation will go to /usr partition, where all your linux commands will be. It is not possible to access and write the linux partition from windows ( if it is a same harddisk ) but viceversa is possible. If you have a windows partition ( NTFS / VFAT ), from linux you can mount the windows partition and you can R/W in that.

Note: If it is a NTFS partition, your kernel should have support for writing NTFS fs, which older kernel don't have by default. So you have to recompile the kernel with NTFS RW support. If the XP is installed with VFAT then you can directly mount it in linux and access (read and write).

[rcgreen]

There are a hundred different ways to do it, but I always try to
simplify. You could put XP on the first primary partition, the root
linux partition for the second primary partition, and linux swap on
the third primary partition. Then, you could create a VFAT partition
on primary partition four. Alternatively, instead of a primary partition,
you could make it an extended partition with more than one VFAT
or FAT32 partitions, which would be readable by both Operating systems.

Now if what you wanted was for the linux partition to be readable
by XP, you'd have to look into the UMSDOS file system.