[Sussex] A different approach to installing Gentoo.

[John]

Hi List,

I am going to try the "alternative" approach to installing gentoo i.e.
install gentoo first and then work out how to get my mandrake re-installed.

So firstly, I should like to apologise for any time wasting I've caused.

Now, as the proud owner of approximately 94.5 gig's of unformatted,
unallocated disc space I would very much appreciate suggestions at to how I
should set things up i.e. partitions etc so I can install gentoo afresh,
then install mandrake.

Partitions are causing me a little confusion, because I now understand that
I can only have 4 primary partitions. Also the default install of gentoo
would normally use hda1, 2 and 3. I had a little "play" earlier, obviously
because of the peculiarities of windows (which I have to keep, as Clare
won't use anything else), I changed the setup to hda1 for windows, then an
extended partition, with 3 "slices" for boot, root and swap, which promptly
became hda5, 6 and 7.

I understand that for ease of system management, it's better if I only have
1 boot partition (something I've read somewhere). Also taking into account
what Steve Dobson said about positioning of swap between the two different
distro's and I'm also unsure if the swap space would have to be primary or
extended/logical.

So thinking along those lines

windowsXP/gentoo root/boot/swap/mandrake root
or
windowsXP/gentoo root/swap/boot/mandrake root

would seem to be a sensible set up, but then as that would be 5 partitions,
some of them would have to be logical, so what would be the most sensible
set up ?

Would say windowsXP/boot/swap/extended partition so I then just have both
mandrake root and gentoo root as logical partitions make more sense ?

What would the most efficient layout be, and does it really matter (disc
access speed and all that kind of stuff seeing as it's only a home/interest
system)?

I've then got the quandary of what is the best method to accomplish this ?
I've got partition magic, but I could use "disc drake" from mandrake (which
I've never actually used before, but have heard that it's quite user
friendly), or fdisk which I have no understanding of whatsoever (plus it's
all that spooky command line stuff - which I haven't got much a clue about
either).


Again, apologies for any time wasting over the last couple of days and any
advice/suggestions are very appreciated.

regards

John D.