Hi,
I am still a newcomer to Linux and am posting this to hopefully help other newcomers install SUSE. I see lots of posts about partitioning.
Here is what I did. It is one option. You do not need to pre-partition. The SUSE installer can partition and format for you.
I felt more comfortable partitioning with software that I was familiar with and that was graphical / visual – in my case that’s Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0. And you do not have to buy partitioning software – GParted live CD is another option for sure.
I have two drives:
Drive C started out with just Windows XP on it. It is 150Gb SATA Fat32, one partition (primary).
Drive D is a backup drive 80Gb EIDE Fat32, one partition (primary). It is obviously the slower and smaller drive so I want Linux on Drive C. I did not do any partitioning on drive D.
Here is what I did step by step.
(1)I got a copy of MBRTOOL (Master Boot Record Tool) and backed up both MBRs.
(2)I decreased the size of the primary partition on drive C so that there was 60Gb of “unallocated” space.
(3)Within the unallocated space I made three logical partitions (these sizes are in round numbers):
[a] 20Gb root partition (this is /)
** 2Gb swap (I have 1.5Gb of RAM, a 1Gb swap is probably more common)
[c] 38 Gb home partition (this is /home)
(4) I used the SUSE 11.0 DVD to install SUSE. The installer detected the root (/), swap and home (/home) Linux partitions. Drive C was sda and the partitions on drive C were sda1 (Windows XP, primary) , sda5 (20Gb, logical, root partition, notice the first logical partition is partition number 5), sda6 (20Gb swap) and sda7 (38 Gb /home). Drive D was sdc.
(5) The installer recommended the following and I accepted all of them:
[a] format sda5 (root) as ext3
** format sda7 (home) as ext3 (the swap partition does not need “formating”)
[c] install GRUB in the MBR of drive D (sdc)
That was pretty much it. I used MBRTOOL to make another backup of the current MBRs.
I am extremely impressed with SUSE 11.0 and Linux in general and I am very glad that I am using and learning more about Linux. I have SATA, EIDE, DVD burner, CD burner, an ATI graphics card, an HP multi-function device, etc. and everything works fine! Hats off to the Linux community!
jimusa****