Dualbooting Redhat 9 & Win XP

[Voffinn]

Hello,

I did a search on this site, but i didn't find anything about dualbooting xp & redhat, i have xp innstalled on disk G:\ and i have a completely empty disc, that i am going to install rh9 on. Could someone post here couple of guidelines, (what to do & what NOT to do). ? Or maby you have a good guide about this ? i can not miss my xp out of the comp. pllz, can you help ?

With Regards, -Voffinn.

[Dolda2000]

If you have an entire free physical hard drive available for Linux (_not_ a partition), there's nothing to worry about. Just install GRUB on your MBR (/dev/hda) and you'll be fine.

[Voffinn]

does grub have to be on the primary master ?

[Dolda2000]

Becuase that's where the BIOS boots from.

[kpzani]

Install redhat and do a manual disk configuration using the gui druid.

remember don't mess with your windows partition/hard drive. and leave the grub loader settings to default as they should work correctly.
I would recommend creating the following partitions.
example 20GB Hard Drive
/ = 6 Gb
/home = 7 GB
/usr = 6 GB
SWAP = 1 GB (about double ram)

You generally store your docs in a folder inside home. so when you eventually change distro or whatever, you donot need to reformat your /home folder so none of your docs get lost. I am sure there are better partitioning strategies but this seems to work for me.

So using the gui create the partitions and specify there sizes and which drive to put them on, mount points (/ or /home) and what file system. if in doubt go with the default.

[andutt]

Create a /tmp and partition also for security reasons. Then you can mount that partition with nosuid,nodev and some more option to tighten it up a bit.

Regards

[Voffinn]

....and what file system...

what file system should go on what :S

[Dolda2000]

what file system should go on what

Except on the swap partition (which should be formatted as a swap partition, naturally enough), the "standard" Linux file system is ext3 nowadays. You could experiment with stuff like reiserfs or xfs, but I don't really see why.

Create a /tmp and partition also for security reasons.

Although I do agree that it's a pretty good idea, I wouldn't really say that the point of doing that on a home installation seems that great. (Sure, you could avoid some cracking problems, but really...)

/ = 6 Gb
/home = 7 GB
/usr = 6 GB
SWAP = 1 GB (about double ram)

Why ever would he want a seperate /usr partition? Having /usr on a seperate partition at all is just an ancient remnant from when UNIX was distributed on one root tape and one usr tape. On modern systems, I see no use at all for it. I do also recommend using LVM for partitioning, but that's a bit harder than normal partitioning.
Also, be wary about that swap=2*ram thing. If you have 512 MB RAM you hardly need swap at all on a home installation. As wassy recently explained on this forum, that sizing guideline is primarily used when your machine will be swapping heavily (since the swap algorithms are optimized against that), like on a low-mem machine or a really busy production system. On a home machine, it's virtually useless, since it probably won't be swapping that much anyway. Especially not if you have 512 MB RAM.

[shownuff001]

I was also partioning my hardrive using a /home and diffrent /usr directory. I wondered why I even had to do that if when you navigate your system its /home/usr. So you're saying make a /home and thats it?

can you give us an example of a typical home install partitioning scheme and a production enviorment, say a database box.


thanks in advance. :P

[l_Kriss]

Except on the swap partition (which should be formatted as a swap partition, naturally enough), the "standard" Linux file system is ext3 nowadays. You could experiment with stuff like reiserfs or xfs, but I don't really see why.

Some journalled filesystems are a bit faster, but the effect would not be noticable, for me that is. but I might be wrong, as I often am