[Sussex] A different approach to installing Gentoo.

[John Crowhurst]

> 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.

Firstly, because the nature of Windows (dominant operating system), it
will only install on the first partition, so hda1 is windows.

You could take hda2 for boot, hda3 for swap, then make hda4 extended.
You can then install Gentoo root into hda5, Mandrake root into hda6.

So you could have Win/Boot/Swap/Gentoo Root/Mandrake Root

Having boot first would probably make things easier to work with, but I
doubt Linux really cares.

> 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)?

Efficiency isn't so much of a problem because unless you have something
I/O specific, you wouldn't notice anyway!

> 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).

I've not used diskdrake and although I've used PM8 before, I don't
particularly think it will help.

I like fdisk, cause its powerful and reasonably easy to use. The basic
options you use are:

p - print the partition table on the screen
n - create new partition
d - delete a partition
q - leave the program
w - write changes to disk
t - change the type of the partition
a - mark partition active.

Here is one I did earlier ( in keystrokes):

p - Print partition table
n - New partition
p - Primary Partition
2 - Partition number
1 - First Cylinder
+20M - Size of partition (for boot)

n - New partition
p - Primary Partition
3 - Partition Number
(default) - First Cylinder
+1024M - Size of partition (for swap - 1GB)
t - Change partition type
82 - 82 is Linux Swap (you can list them all by typing L)

n - New partition
e - Extended partition
4 - Partition Number
(default) - First Cylinder
(default) - Size of partition (rest of disk)

n - New partition
l - Logical partition
(default) - First Cylinder
+20480M - Size of partition (20GB)

n - New partition
l - Logical partition
(default) - First Cylinder
(default) - Size of partition (rest of disk)

p - Print partition table
w - Write changes (if you make a mistake, leave off the w and it won't
save changes.)
q - Quit program

That is how you would do it (change the values to how you need them)


-- 
John