I’ve been playing around with opensuse and have decided to install it. Before I do though, I have a question: is it possible to install opensuse over debian? When I started the installer, it gave me a choice of strinking my windows partition but I don’t want to do that. Right now here’s how my hard drive is split up:
sda1 FAT32 (backup of windows) 4 gigabytes
sda2 NTFS (windows) 76 gigabytes
sda3 ext3 (For right now, Debian) 98 gigabytes
sda4 linux swap 2 gigabytes
I have plenty of space for opensuse and I want to keep windows (sda2) the way it is. Is there a way to tell the installer to use sda3 and then use sda4 for the swap space?
There is always the advanced/custom partitioning option where you can specify on which partition which filesystem should be mounted and if it needs to be formatted…
Yes, when selecting the partitions choose expert and then use sda3,
but I recommend you to delete sda3 and sda4 and create a swap, / and
/home partitions
Anyway, manually partitioning isn’t making any sense to me right now and everything I’m trying doesn’t seem to be working. So, I looked at the LVM option and this is what it suggested:
Delete partition /dev/sda4 (2.87 GB)
Delete partition /dev/sda5 (2.87 GB)
Set type of partition /dev/sda3 to 8E
Create boot partition /dev/sda4 (70.60 MB) with ext4
Create volume group system from /dev/sda3
Create logical volume /dev/system/home (25.00 GB) for /home with ext4
Create logical volume /dev/system/root (20.00 GB) for / with ext4
Create swap logical volume /dev/system/swap (1.96 GB)
Set mount point of /dev/sda1 to /windows/C
Set mount point of /dev/sda2 to /windows/D
My problem is, I don’t understand what some of this is saying (since I’ve never used/heard of LVM based partitioning):
What does Set type of partition /dev/sda3 to 8E mean?
From what I’m looking at, it looks like it’s not messing with sda1 or sda2 (my windows partitions). Can someone confirm this for me?
My main concern is I don’t want sda1 or sda2 to be resized or deleted. If they aren’t going to be touched (from what I’m looking at, that should be the case), I’ll try the LVM option.