Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2009 mails)

[tduggan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tim Duggan)]

Hi Filip,

Friday, September 29, 2000, 12:19:20 PM, you wrote:

> Hi all,

> Just bought a new scsi disk.
> I have Win installed on sda, Suse 7 on sdb and would like to install RH7 on sdc
> My partitions on sdb for SuSE are :
> sdb1    /webdownloads   3GB
> sdb2    /boot           23MB
> sdb3    /swap           258MB
> sdb4    Etended
> sdb5    /
> sdb6    /usr
> sdb7    /var
> sdb8    /opt
> sdb9    /tmp
> sdb10   /home

> My questions are :

> 1.How do I partition my 3rd disk ?
Ah, a loaded question! I'll refrain from saying use fdisk ;-)
Seriously, it's basically a personal preference and will depend on
whether and how you want to use shared partitions. Mount points that can
be shared easily by multiple distros include the following:
/webdownloads (since you have it)
/usr/doc (not much point in duplicating text)
swap (saves a little space)
/boot (same)
/home (makes it easy for users to have their stuff where they expect it)
/usr/src (again, this is basically text)
I'm sure there are others but these are off the top of my head.

> 2.Do I still need a boot and swap partition in disk 3 ?
No you can use the ones you have. My preference is to set up my disks in
the following way. I keep one /boot which has the following
subdirectories:
/boot/suse (where my suse stuff lives)
/boot/deb (I keep debian kernels here)
/boot/test (let's just say some days I feel lucky)
/boot/lilo (this is where I keep a global lilo.conf that is used by both)

For swap space:
Each disk has a swap partition. The swaps are used together and shared by
both distributions. I also try to place them near the middle of the disk.
(why the middle? I was told access was faster because maximum head travel
is shorter. Hey, it made sense in the 80's and old habits die hard.:-))
If you really want a challenge, you can even share the swap partitions
between linux and windows, but this can really slow down the boot/shutdown
process and I'm not sure why you would want to do it anyway.

> 3.Must I skip the lilo installation on the mbr when installing RH7 which will
> probably override the SuSE one
> 4.Will RH7 destroy system.map, map and initrd in my /boot ( sdb2 ) ?
I'll answer these together. First, no you don't have to skip it, but
since you're going to be customizing it later there is no real reason to
go through it twice. Make sure you don't format /boot!! as some installs
like to format and repartition disks for you. It would be wise to change
the names if you are going to keep them in the same directory (you can
simply add -suse to the end, ie. system.map-suse) and you will have to
modify lilo.conf accordingly.

> Thanks for any help

> Filip.
HTH

-- 
Good luck,
 Tim
mailto:tduggan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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