Question about installation partitioning

[Furion02]

Hello everyone,

I'm current in the process of trying to install openSUSE and it doesn't seem to notice the separate 10 GB partition i made for it by using Partition Magic in Windows. And for that matter it doesn't even seem to recognize my Windows OS. I have 194 GB HD and it wants to spend 2.0 GB on the swap partition. 20 GB for the root partition and a whooping 167.9 GB for the /home with ext 3! Can't i just split all that up with 10 GB (I know its not a lot but i can always add more later). But it's not even recognizing my full 194 GB says i have 189.9 GB when i try to create my own partition setup.. How do i get it to see the 10 GB thats free space? Thank you for your time.

[waterhead]

Please let the installer re-format the 10GB partition, for best results. 10GB is a bit small, but just don't install everything on the DVD.

When you select a manual setup, it should show you the existing partitions. Windows is almost always the first partition of the first disk.

First disk = hda
1st disk, 1st partition = hda1 (windows NTFS)
1st disk, 2nd partition = hda2
etc.

Second disk - hdb
2nd disk, 1st partition = hdb1
2nd disk, 2nd partition - hdb2
etc.

The Windows partition will be labeled as NTFS. Make sure that you do not reformat this partition. There is a section in the installer where you can customize the name for the "other" operating system (meaning Windows).

If you can find the room on the hard drive, I recommend creating a Fat32 partition that will be accessible by both partitions. Linux will call it a vfat partition in the installer.

[waterhead]

Oh, I should maybe recommend a partitioning plan.

1GB - Linux swap
4.5GB - /home (ext3)
4.5GB - / (ext3)

[Jonathan183]

Partition setup is a personal thing ... there are pros and cons for various setups. I suggest you use the PartedMagic CD for creating the partitions you want. Since you seem to have more than enough space to go at I'd start with 25GB for root (/), 5GB for home (/home), swap is usually 2xRAM but probably won't need to exceed 1GB, create other partitions for data as you want. The / and /home partitions should have ext3 format. OpenSUSE 10.3 supports read/write to NTFS partitions using the ntfs-3g driver. I like to use separate data partitions which I used to make FAT32 partitions, since the ntfs-3g driver works you could use NTFS for your shared data.
If you want more help with your current setup it would be useful if you run

fdisk -l

in a terminal as root user and post the output here.

Edit: I would free up a bit more space than 10GB, running out of space on any OS will cause problems which can be quite difficult to fix. You can resize partitions including NTFS partitions using the PartedMagic CD.
If you want to stick with 10GB then I'd go with 5 or 6GB for root, 3 or 4GB for home and 1GB for swap - but you will need to keep an eye on what you install - running out of space on root will definitely cause you problems.