Partitions

[caboose]

I need help. SuSE linux, every time it tries to install, wants to shrink the windows partion. I figured this wouldn't be so bad, as long as windows was still there

(Windows has all my files and they aren't backed up onto anything)

But then the installation guide said that anything in red text would be deleted, and this was in red, and now I don't know how to re-size to keep Windows and Suse.

Oh, and Ubuntu. I have 330GB of HDD storage space left, and my computer is a compaq CQ61.

Any help would be appreciated

[gogalthorp]

Ok here is the deal. You must supply enough unpartitioned space for the install. This can be done by the installer or you can use any other partition manager. But in any case I highly recommend backing up any important data before you mess with changing any partitioning. If you trip over the power cable or otherwise lose power while resizing you could end up with a mess. If you are uncomfortable with the installer doing the resize use some other partition manager. Just be warned that any resizing of partitions puts any data on the partition at risk.

By default Suse Install creates 3 new partitions (swap, root, home) Swap is special and can be shared between multiple Linux installs. It generally is set at 2X memory but 1gig is normally plenty. root contains the root file system and the system files and program files. This should be 8 to 30 gigs depending on what you plan to install on the system. Home is mounted in the root files system as /home and contains personal data and settings for all the users and by default take the remaining unpartitioned space unless you tell the installer different . Ubuntu does not use a separate partition for home as default but you can if you tell the installer to do it. In theory you can share the home partition between Linux OS's but you may run into some problems unless you set up separate accounts to hold the GUI settings. The good thing of having a separate /home is that you can modify the OS or install another on the root partition and never touch your data on home.

Hope that helps

[D-cat]

Here's my recommendation for external (live) CD. If you have enough RAM to run it off a RAMdisk, then you can pll this disc out and make all the backups as well as repartition and a bunch of other stuff with this one CD. Otherwise you might want to get an external USB hard drive for your data backups (slow, but worth it).

Parted Magic

[caboose]

How much RAM would be neccessary, and how would I do all the other stuff you said?

[gogalthorp]

gparted is about 100 meg so call it 512Meg to allow for some caching and running processes should be enough. More is of course better.

gparted should load itself to RAM at boot if you have sufficient ram. You can then remove the CD and use gparted to burn any data you might want to backup. Then use it to adjust partition sizes to allow the free space for the Linux install. Of course you could just do the backup from Windows. This is just for safety, You can resize the partitions with out backing up assuming the partitions have sufficient space available. ie if your partition is 90% full you can at best reduce the size by 10%. In which case you just hope something does not go wrong. It is all a question of how important the data is to you and how much effort it would take to replace it if something should go wrong.