Hi everyone,
I have performed a fresh installation of OpenSUSE many times. And that worked fine for me. However, recently I purchased a new 10.1" net-book (HP mini 110-3000) that comes with a light version of windows 7 pre-installed (what an ironi…how generous is that! 
). Thus, I’d like to install OpenSUSE 11.3 gnome in my net-book (Dual boot with win7). Obviously, i’m keeping the latter because you never know when it’s needed…plus the fact that its already been paid for…
I’ve done my homework and searched this topic in various forums and blogs, but the variety of opinions and suggestion got me confused…so I thought to get the right opinion from the right source/users.
This HP mini has a 1.00 GB of memory (RAM) and using Intel Atom CPU N450 processor…Its a 32-bit system and the total disk size is 150 GB. Here is how the hard disk is utilized:
c: 148.75 GB NTFS (Boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition)
d: 99.00 MB FAT32 (primary partition) contains HP tools required for sys recovery, I think…
system: 199.00 MB NTFS (system active, primary partition) which probably required for sys recovery, I think…
However, when I go to “My Computer” I can only see two partitions, C and D…and that “system” partition I can only see when I go to the disk management utility in windows.
Now, what would a perfect installation be like? I want to have the most optimized disk partitioning and filing system (ext3, ext4…etc) in order to achieve the following:
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I would like to be able to use my home folder(s) (documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos) in both the systems, OpenSUSE and windows.
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I would like to give the best allocation of disk to OpenSUSE in-order to achieve the best performance when surfing the net, watching videos, listening to audio files or doing any of the day to day tasks that a net-book is expected to handle.
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I would like to keep a fair share of the disk for windows just to keep it minimally up and running.
3)Down the road, I would probably need to format or re-install one of the two systems (OpenSUSE or Windows)…I would like to be able to perform that without the risk of losing the data saved on the home folders of the other system.
I don’t know if this kind of installation is possible or not…could someone please shed the light in here with their experience, and provide/guide me through the proper steps to make such installation possible.
Thanks
Mukhtarz
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I would like to be able to use my home folder(s) (documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos) in both the systems, OpenSUSE and windows.
openSuse 11.3 can read and write NTFS partitions, so this shouldn’t be an issue. Windows cannot read linux partitions. I’m guessing you’ll want the majority of your parition space setup for Windows.
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I would like to give the best allocation of disk to OpenSUSE in-order to achieve the best performance when surfing the net, watching videos, listening to audio files or doing any of the day to day tasks that a net-book is expected to handle.
This probably depends more on the swap space allocated, rather than partition size. With 1GB memory, 2GB swap space will be more than sufficient.
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I would like to keep a fair share of the disk for windows just to keep it minimally up and running.
If you want to access your filesystems in both windows and linux, the majority of space will be setup as the NTFS partition. Fat32 has a file size limit of 4GB, which is quite limiting these days.
4)Down the road, I would probably need to format or re-install one of the two systems (OpenSUSE or Windows)…I would like to be able to perform that without the risk of losing the data saved on the home folders of the other system.
Before you did a reinstall on one or the other, you would just have to copy your data to the other system. Another alternative is to get an external USB drive and copy the data there. This can also serve as a backup.
While you’re doing the install, you should be able to resize your partition. Or, you can use a utility to do it before you start.
I would allocate 23 GB for your / partition, and 2 GB swap partition.
So, overall…
You’ll have your 3 Windows partitions and then you’ll also have 2 Linux partitions.
You can assign your windows partitions any mount point you want. By default, I believe they’re mounted in /windows/c, /windows/d, /windows/e, etc…
Note you are allowed only 4 primary partitions. To have more one of the primaries must be an extended. Then additional partitions are created in the extended partition as logical partitions.
If you installed SUSE so many times I’m kind of surprised you need to ask some of this.
If you have to re-install windows at some point, wave bye bye to openSUSE, unless you have a Proper windows installation disk.
Personally I would delete everything by the actual windows installation C as they call it.
Then shrink windows C to about half
Create one large extended partition in all the space you free up and then 3 logical partitions in that (swap, /, /home)
But with regard to sharing documents, I would suggest you decide which OS is going to be Master and then copy the files from that to the other on a regular basis.
Hi,
Actually, I did install SUSE many times on my older laptop, but not with the same conditions…usually I would go by the suggested partitioning given by SUSE installer and I would use Dropbox to sync my folders between the two systems (SUSE and windows)…
I thought that there would be another way to handle this…But in that case, and as rodhuffaker explained, I would be forced to give the majority of my desk space to windows and will have to use NTFS…I don’t really understand the difference between the different filing systems, but i noticed that NTFS is not preferred for Linux. Beside, I want to keep the majority of the desk space for SUSE…
I started the installation and now I’m looking at the suggested partitioning in SUSE installer. It is suggesting that Windows partition would be shrunk to 60 GB and an extended partition of 87 GB would be created…This new partition would have swap (2 GB), root (20 GB) and /home (66 GB).
I think this is fare…
I will just go the old way…use Dropbox to sync my folders between SUSE and windows…and life goes on 
Thanks for the help anyways…
Please tell me you did a defrag on windows!
OMG…I forgot to defrag windows…
right now I’m using SUSE and its fine…but when I ran windows for the 1st time after installing OpenSUSE, windows did a disk check which took a considerable amount of time…I’m afraid that the system files got corrupted or something…don’t know if there is a way to check it out or should I just wait until it stop working one day!!
As for OpenSUSE…its running smoothly…
It sounds like you are OK. Lucky eh!
Try not to worry.
It’s a bit of a rude and unintended way, but look at it like this: you’ll be an experienced openSUSE user in no time. The Win7 was crippled anyway.