Re: [SLE] Re: Newbies Installing 9.0

On Friday 19 March 2004 7:46 pm, John Pettigrew wrote:

In a previous message, Vince Littler wrote:

...

I would partition something like this:

40MB Primary partition type ext2 or 3, Linux /boot

40MB Primary partition type FAT32, win xp boot

remainder of the disk is an extended partition with Logical drives

Remembering that Windows insists on having the first partition on the disk or it won't boot.

Only true if there is only the default 1 Primary partition on the HD, AFAIK. Windows demands any Primary Partition on the 1st HD, which can be 1 of up to 4 partitions, or of 3 partitions if there is an extended partition. It does not demand the first Primary. Only 1 Primary Partition on any HD can be 'active' in Windows terms at any time - ie this partition is recognised by the Windows OS associated with that partition as drive C:. The other primary partitions are invisible to windows, except for the fdisk program. It is perfectly possible to switch the active Primary using fdisk and have a multiple boot windows + windows + windows system, although this would be quite clunky. GRUB would handle this sort of scenario much more elegantly, provided you have a Linux available to set it up. This is more an issue of how the BIOS works, than of any particular OS, although Windows after boot up seeing only whichever single Primary the BIOS says is active, whereas Linux will see all the primaries after boot. Understanding this issue is important to getting Windows and Linux to live together in the long run. If you give each a separate primary to boot from, booting the Linux primary and using GRUB either to boot Linux or to chain boot Windows, you really are safe to reinstall windows and be confident that Linux will still boot [alright, you will need to reboot windows and reset the active partition back to your Linux /boot partition]. Otherwise, a Windows reinstall can easily install its own Master Boot Record and stop Linux booting - and require an outing for the rescue system on the CD. I suppose some will say that this is all getting a bit complex for a newbie install, but that's the way it is if you want dual boot. You could take the easy route, with a single Primary Partition at the outset, at risk of losing the ability to boot Linux after a windows reinstall, and correct me if I am wrong, but there is at least one system where that happened, and this list failed to get it back! Vince