Hello!
I was running Windows Vista, and had a 20GB partition i wasnt using for anything special, so thought i would install the latest openSUSE beta to check it out. However, during the install, the Vista partition got shrinked, which in turn damaged my partition tables and more so that I had to reformat everything and install Vista again.
Now, i would still like to try out openSUSE, so i want to install it on the 20GB partition, and only on the 20GB partition! What do I have to do? Because during the install, it creates a swap partition which im guessing is going to mean that the Windows (primary) partition will be resized again, which really isnt what I want!
Thanks
Cheers!
you will need to go into expert partitioning mode (don’t worry, you really don’t need to be an expert) and manually choose your partitioning. on such a small partition, i would suggest something along the lines of - bearing in mind you will create 3 partitions on this 20gb partition:
1 - swap partition - about the same in GB as you have in RAM. so if you have 1gb ram, have 1gb swap.
2 - / or ‘root’ partition - make this about 10GB or so
3 - /home partition for all user data - the rest, so 8-9gb.
hope this helps. but obviously you can change the set up to what you want, this is roughly what i would have on a small partition like that.
Be a little careful – think it through that you can only have four primary partitions and you’re going to need three partitions for Suse. So count up how many partitions you will need all up on that drive and if > 4 then think about using an extended partition and putting the Linux partitions into that. But maybe you need only 4 total.
Hi thestig,
regarding swap partition you have said "swap partition - about the same in GB as you have in RAM. so if you have 1gb ram, have 1gb swap. "
my query is if i ve 2 gb ram where i should create 2gb swap partition. ? or 1gb is more than enough.
regards
suresh
regards
suresh
generally speaking, i would create a 2gb partition for swap with 2gb ram, but i have never installed on such small partition so i don’t know about smaller swap partition. swap is to help with high memory loads, so 2gb would be better of course. others will be able to advise if only 1gb if is enough as i don’t know, sorry.
and take note of what swerdna said, as i think vista has other partitions like recovery partitions so you may need to create extended partition.
You dont really need that big swap partition. Swap parititons is used only when your apps or operating system spend all RAM. 2 gb of RAM is enough for desktop machine so 200-500 MB of swap is enough.
Yeh - expert mode, and just create your 3 partitions on it as above - to be sure… you can create an extended partition of 20GB, then split that up into your 3 / /home and swap… id go for like 700 ish MB of swap. and a healthy 9GB for your / (where openSUSE goes) and the rest for /home (where your files and stuff you save in openSUSE goes - you COULD even make this FAT32 so you can access it from Vista, but, thats up to you! there are tools somewhere for windows to read ext3 [the linux filesystem you should pick for /])
hope that, maybe, kinda, posssibly makes some sense!