Best way to partition HDD

[aliov]

Hi all,

I want some suggestions for a best way to partition HDD to install only two Linux Distro (no Windowz).
suppose that we have a 60 GB HDD, and we want to make one large partition for Slackware and one for Ubuntu with common swap space and with another free partition for storing some common data between Slack and Ubuntu,

let's say for :
Slackware ----- 40 GB for / (reiserfs)
Free Parition ----- 10 GB
Common Swap ----- 500 MB (reiserfs )
Ubuntu --------- 9.5 GB for / (reiserfs).

so my question is about wish is the best way from primary/extended point of view to make this,i don't want to mount anything like /home /usr/local as an independent partitions.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Cheers.

[devils casper]

Common Swap ----- 500 MB (reiserfs )

dont format SWAP partition in reiserfs filesystem. you can install Ubuntu in reiserfs but default, ext3 is recommended.

so my question is about wish is the best way from primary/extended point of view to make this,i don't want to mount anything like /home /usr/local as an independent partitions.

create one Primary and one Extended. install Slackware in Primary and create SWAP, Common and Ubuntu's / as Logical Partitions inside Extended.

[rcgreen]

Since you only need four partitions, you could make them all primary.
It's simple and sweet. In fact you could get by without a common
data partition, since each distro could mount the other's partition.
You'd just have to take care not to modify system files from the
other distro, just data.

[aliov]

For devil_casper, i know that the swap partition should be 82 linux swap and not reiserfs,but i typed wrong, imean the free common partition to be reiserfs.

for the common data,it's just to put my very important data,in case that i want to change something in the other partition i'll still have a backup partition.

but for the instance i have all of them as a primary partitions, my main problem it's that grub is very slow after resume from suspend to disk!!!

no message is out just it takes a lot of time to boot .
i'll make a post of this to describe the problem.

[rudie_rage]

Dont know if it would work, but I would try something similar to:

Slackware: 10Gb /
Ubuntu: 10Gb /
Swap: 500Mb (I'd go for 1Gb, but looks like your already happy with what you have)
Common storage dir: 39.5Gb /home

and then I'd have both Ubuntu and Slack mount the common storage dir as home. That way all your files are right there, no matter what you boot. The only problem would lie in the fact that if you have the same program on both computers and you change a users setting, it changes across both OS's

I have never done something like this, since I tend to stick with one OS, but theoretically it should work fine. (or at least the theories that go on in my head )

[devils casper]

That way all your files are right there, no matter what you boot. The only problem would lie in the fact that if you have the same program on both computers and you change a users setting, it changes across both OS's

there are a few more problems.
User-specific configuration items are stored in "dotfiles" (filenames starting with '.') in each user's home directory. these files are often not backward compatible between versions of applications.
let say, both distros have KDE. the preference files in $HOME/.kde/ for KDE 3.4 are probably not compatible with KDE 3.5. this is even more true for Desktop preference files between different Linux distributions.

[aliov]

Sure i'm not going to have the /home directory common between two distro i prefer everything separated.

I'm asking the question of the partition olny for my problem with grub,since probably having all partitions as primary can slow grub to resume from suspend to disk !!!!

[rudie_rage]

there are a few more problems.
User-specific configuration items are stored in "dotfiles" (filenames starting with '.') in each user's home directory. these files are often not backward compatible between versions of applications.
let say, both distros have KDE. the preference files in $HOME/.kde/ for KDE 3.4 are probably not compatible with KDE 3.5. this is even more true for Desktop preference files between different Linux distributions.

good to know, so i dont end up learning the hard way