Firstly i must say i’m a lover of opensuse, initially 10.2 and now 11.0 although i’ve tried many Linux’s over a number of years. Fedora held my attention for a while but once i tried opensuse i found it had the right balance for me. Now to my problem, i run dual boot with WinXP and opensuse and would like to try other linux’s as a third option. I have a 500gb sata drive which is a little messed up due to poor planning and using (probably) incompatable partioning software. I’m prepared to start from scratch if need be so i’m seeking advice from more seasoned users/guru’s as to what might be the best way to set up the partitioning of the drive.I’m particularly interested in primary and extended partitions, cheers and thanks in advance for your advice.
If you post the result of this from a su terminal:
fdisk -l
It may be possible to shrink on of your existing partitions and install in the space we acquire.
If suse is your main OS, you can keep the suse bootloader by not installing a bootloader with the new OS, we can then add a boot option for the new OS in the suse menu.lst
Here is result of fdisk -l
main0:/home/rod # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3ec23ec1
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2611 20972826 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 2612 30205 221648805 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda5 2612 7833 41945683+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 7834 7846 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 7847 11763 31463271 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 11764 24818 104864256 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 24819 25341 4200966 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda10 25342 27773 19535008+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 27774 30205 19535008+ 83 Linux
which may not show the real situation. I have tried several disk utilities some of which show problems some of which don’t, therefore i am leaning towards scrapping everything and starting again.
So what is in the Blue and what is in the Red?
kraftywun wrote:
> Here is result of fdisk -l
> main0:/home/rod # fdisk -l
>
> Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> Disk identifier: 0x3ec23ec1
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/sda1 * 1 2611 20972826 c W95 FAT32
> (LBA)
> /dev/sda2 2612 30205 221648805 f W95 Ext’d
> (LBA)
> /dev/sda5 2612 7833 41945683+ b W95 FAT32
> /dev/sda6 7834 7846 104391 83 Linux
> /dev/sda7 7847 11763 31463271 83 Linux
> /dev/sda8 11764 24818 104864256 83 Linux
> /dev/sda9 24819 25341 4200966 82 Linux swap /
> Solaris
> /dev/sda10 25342 27773 19535008+ 83 Linux
> /dev/sda11 27774 30205 19535008+ 83 Linux
> which may not show the real situation. I have tried several disk
> utilities some of which show problems some of which don’t, therefore i
> am leaning towards scrapping everything and starting again.
So that thing is a single hard drive? After a few years of faithful
services, it’s always a good idea to “refresh”.
You are on XP now? Why does it show FAT? You don’t want FAT, unless you
have small partitions for M$.
What I would do, and actually did for myself (your needs might dictate
otherwise): first install M$ as primary partition (unless you like
reinstalling GRUB). Then another primary partition for opensuse. Then I
would wrap the rest in extended partition, make the customary swap, and
leave the rest empty, for future expansion. I have an “exchange” ext3
partition, to mount in Windows using ext2,3 drivers (no need of that
unless you’re okay to have your entire Linux exposed in Windows).
You should also check the cylinder limits of your BIOS. On my PIII, it
would not boot anything after 137GB, so I wasted my time installing it
“far away” on an extended partition, and had to work out my partition
table. Boot partition can be handy. On my new machine it’s ok for up to
2TB in the BIOS.
Thanks for your interest caf, the blue denotes my opensuse install (/boot,/root,&/home) and the red denotes an attempt to install debian linux (/root,&/home). The debian install borked just at the end of the partitioning phase which led me to check things out with other disk utilities. A couple of errors were reported which in my experience are usually best fixed by formatting and going again so i’m keen on doing that but i want to structure the drive to best advantage.
Well I can’t see why it shouldn’t work. Can you elaborated on what happens when the install fails.
If it were me I would not be allowing this second Linux OS install a bootloader. I would want to keep my SUSE one. I would then add a boot in SUSE’s menu for the other OS.
Do you still have a working SUSE bootloader?
I can’t really see any benefit in formatting the drive.