Looking to dual boot OpenSuse with Windows 7 - Windows already installed. Shouldn’t there be some mention of the windows partitions? Or am I worrying about nothing?
Any advice appreciated.
Blair
Current set up:
/dev/sda1 ntfs system reserved 100mb
/dev/sda2 ntfs 134.84gb
/dev/sda3 extended 330.83gb
/dev/sda5 ext4 168.07gb
/dev/sda7 ext4 147.16gb
/dev/sda8 swap 3.87gb
/dev/sda6 swap 11.72gb
Set-up proposed at OpenSuse installation:
Delete partition /dev/sda5 (168.07gb)
create root value /dev/sda8 (20gb) with ext4
create /dev/sda9 (148.08gb) for home with ext4
use /dev/sda5 as swap
use /dev/sda7 as swap
set mount point of /dev/sda2 to windows/C
/dev/sda1 ntfs system reserved 100mb
/dev/sda2 ntfs 134.84gb
/dev/sda3 extended 330.83gb
/dev/sda7 ext4 147.16gb
/dev/sda8 swap 3.87gb
/dev/sda6 swap 11.72gb
create root value /dev/sda8 (20gb) with ext4
create /dev/sda9 (148.08gb) for home with ext4
Using the suggested installation requires that you make sure to install grub into the MBR. This setup will work, but you don’t really need two swaps & you could manually use /dev/sda5 ext4 168.07gb for /home & /dev/sda7 ext4 147.16gb, but if you don’t know how to do that, then just used the proposed setup OR, you could first delete all of the stuff you don’t need in a Live Distro of openSUSE.Specifically remove all of these:
Remove them one at a time in this order:
/dev/sda8 swap 3.87gb
/dev/sda7 ext4 147.16gb
/dev/sda6 swap 11.72gb
/dev/sda5 ext4 168.07gb
/dev/sda3 extended 330.83gb
Make sure to keep and to NOT delete these:
/dev/sda1 ntfs system reserved 100mb
/dev/sda2 ntfs 134.84gb
Then boot from your Linux CD again and start the install process again. For more partitioning info, look at this:
Each hard drive can have up to four PRIMARY partitions, any of which could be marked active and bootable. No matter what you might hear, only one of the first four primary partitions can be booted from. That means you can boot from Primary partitions 1, 2, 3 or 4 and that is all. In order to boot openSUSE, you must load openSUSE and the grub boot loader into one of the first four partitions. Or, your second choice is to load the grub boot loader into the MBR (Master Boot Record) at the start of the disk. The MBR can be blank, like a new disk, it can contain a Windows partition booting code or generic booting code to boot the active partition 1, 2, 3, or 4. Or, as stated before, it can contain the grub boot loader. Why load grub into the MBR then? You do this so that you can “boot” openSUSE from a logical partition, numbered 5 or higher, which is not normally possible. In order to have more than four partitions, one of them (and only one can be assigned as extended) must be a extended partition. It is called an Extended Primary Partition, a container partition, it can be any one of the first four and it can contain one or more logical partitions within. Anytime you see partition numbers 5, 6 or higher for instance, they can only occur inside of the one and only Extended Primary partition you could have.
What does openSUSE want as far as partitions? It needs at minimum a SWAP partition and a “/” partition where all of your software is loaded. Further, it is recommended you create a separate /home partition, which makes it easier to upgrade or reload openSUSE without losing all of your settings. So, that is three more partitions you must add to what you have now. What must you do to load and boot openSUSE from an external hard drive? Number one, you must be able to select your external hard drive as the boot drive in your BIOS setup. Number two, you need to make sure that the external hard drive, perhaps /dev/sdb, is listed as the first hard drive in your grub device.map file and listed as drive hd0. I always suggest that you do not load grub into the MBR, but rather into the openSUSE “/” root primary partition which means a primary number of 1, 2, 3 or 4. If number one is used, then that will be out. You will mark the openSUSE partition as active for booting and finally you must load generic booting code into the MBR so that it will boot the openSUSE partition. I suggest a partition like this:
/dev/sda, Load MBR with generic booting code
/dev/sda1, Primary, booting NTFS Partition for Windows (small < 500 mb)
/dev/sda2, Primary, NTFS Partition for Windows (Main / Large Partition)
/dev/sda3, Primary EXT4 “/” openSUSE Partition Marked Active for booting (80-120 GB)
/dev/sda4, Primary Extended Partition (Rest of Disk)
Yes, remove these partitions (if they don’t contain data you want to preserve). You don’t need 2 swap partitions. The suggested partitioning is based on the existing partitions and is not as clean as it would be otherwise.