On 13/08/12 00:31, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2012/08/12 19:20 (GMT+1000) Basil Chupin composed: [...........]
I am also assuming that sdc2 is the active partition for Windows where
the NTLDR will go, and that sdc3 is the common /boot partition for the 4 Linux distros.
It's a single HD system. There is no sdc.
Many thanks for the clairifications you give below. But, re above, from the first URL: # fdisk -l /dev/sdc Disk /dev/sdc: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0xdf5ee107 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 * 1 51 409626 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdc2 52 116 522112+ 1b Hidden W95 FAT32 /dev/sdc3 117 142 208845 83 Linux /dev/sdc4 143 182401 1463995417+ 5 Extended /dev/sdc5 143 665 4200966 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdc6 666 926 2096451 1b Hidden W95 FAT32 [..............]
be doing is: From the above (first URL example) I am concluding that what I should
a. create a 500MB Primary partition with 32FAT to act as C:/ for Windows and which I will make ACTIVE;
You probably only want it active while installing Windows, unless you plan to chainload from NTLDR to your master Grub or other Grubs on every boot. If it's not active when you begin Windows installation, it will be when it's over, until you switch it back.
500M is on the tiny side for XP's operating files, probably too small. Around 40M is enough for its boot files and temporary installation files. 3GB or more is what XP needs for the OS, paging and basic software, but with 4G of real RAM it will always be virtually void of freespace due to XP's brain dead calculation of needed paging space. You'll want to disable its paging, or set it to a minimal size, if you're not going to give it a much bigger operating partition.
Eh, I got myself all tied up at this point from this point :-( . I never[***] install XP into C:/ but always into D:/ which is why I create C:/ as 500MB and make it active and use whatever space (>20GB) for XP itself. Whenever I have done this, XP has always put the NTLDR into C:/. [***] EXCEPT in this particular instance where over the past couple of days to save some time I actually installed XP into one big C:/ partition (Primary); then created an extended partition from the remaining space and which I then broke up into logical partitions (a) swap, (b) linux-1, (c) linux-2, (d), linux-3, (e) linux-4 with openSUSE 12.2 sitting in (b) and openSUSE 12.1 now sitting in (c).
by Linux distros; b. create a 200MB Primary partition called /boot formatted ext3 for use
Not an entirely good plan:
1-This should be your master Grub.
From this point onwards you lost me I am sorry to say :-( . But don't worry, I'll reread what you wrote until I "get it" :-) . What is throwing me off is that I have installed XP and also installed openSUSE 12.2. I then installed openSUSE 12.1 and it picked up XP and 12.2 so that when I boot my computer I get a grub menu which allows me to boot into any one of these 3 systems. I realise that when I boot I get openSUSE 12.1 (the last installed system) appearing as the first/default item which will be booted but I have already altered the menu.lst in oS 12.1 to boot not from "0" but "2) which openSUSE 12.2. Therefore what you are saying about a Master Grub and copying things all over the place is causing me brain damage :-D . But as I said, it will eventually sink in :-) . Some light is already starting to break thru but there is still some way to go :-) . [........] BC -- Using openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 KDE 4.8.4 & kernel 3.5.1-2 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org