[Sussex] A different approach to installing Gentoo.

[John]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Crowhurst" <fyremoon at fyremoon.net>
To: <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 7:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Sussex] A different approach to installing Gentoo.

> 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.

A genius idea, thanks John. I still haven't managed to work out whether or
not the "Windows first" thing is actually "dyed in the wool"? because the
partitioning Howto at TLDP deals with scsi drives and they suggest having
boot first, then windows, but also that boot, tmp, var, home and usr have
their own partitions, which as Steve Dobson suggested when I first started
asking questions about this, is probably over kill (plus where in hells name
would root go?) anyway, if I allowed say 25 gig's for the gentoo and
mandrake root systems, I could always have a go at something else at the
same time (it's all to do with which system of package management I prefer)
and the boot and swap partitions should (well that's if I understand it
correctly) be able to be used for however many distro's I had installed ??

> 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.

I would like to sound all adventurous and say that I've used fdisk, but I've
taken the cowards way out, and as I'm finishing off typing this, I've got
partition magic going in the background making my partitions as follows,

hda1 windowsXP about 20 gig's, hda2 boot about 1 gig, hda3 swap about 1.5
gig's, hda4 extended which means that hda5 should be gentoo root 25 gig's
and hda6 should be mandrake root 25 gig's, and I've still got 41.8 gig's
unallocated.

So I'm going to press on and try to install the gentoo.

Many thanks

Regards

John D.