Linux noob here so take it nice and slow, Windows veteran so that side of things is covered.
Hardware:
Dell XPS M1330 Laptop
Intel Core2Duo T8100
4GB DDR2
320GB HD
OEM Vista HomePrem SP1 (preinstalled)
Nvidia GeForce 8400GS
etc…
Current stage:
Currently only OS installed is Vista on the first (and only) partition of the hard drive (I removed the mediadirect crap and recovery partition)
I have a newly burnt DVD of openSuse 11 x64.
Am not particularly concerned about losing my vista partition if it all goes ballsup but I would like to vista-suse working in a dual boot configuration if possible without having to reinstall vista.
Now, the suse installer is very nice and pretty and pretty much sets everything up for me except I am confused by the disk partitioning it has proposed as it wants to delete Vista (I don’t blame it tbh)
Currently plenty of free space on the drive (in excess of 200GB)
/dev/sda 298.09GB total capacity (according to expert partitioner section)
suse installer proposes the following disk arrangement:
shrink windows partition dev/sda1 to 147.04GB (in red which I assume means delete or something)
create extended partition dev/sda2 (151.05GB)
create swap partition dev/sda5 (2.01GB)
create root partition dev/sda6 (20GB) with ext3
create partition dev/sda7 (129.04GB) for /home with ext3
Now if my math serves me right, adding all of that together comes to more than the capacity of my hard drive (just under 300GB)…so what gives and can you suggest a suitable partition setup (also why it wants to create 3 partitions not including Vista)?
Also I assume by reading the sticky that if grub doesn’t recognise the OEM Vista after install then it is just a case of running the command to edit the bootloader?
The extended partion is just the place in which you create the logical
partitions, so you should not add them together. The openSUSE installers
proposal is oke. Before you install openSUSE just check the harddrive for
errors, remove temporarily the assigned virtual diskspace in Windows,
defragment the Windows partition and and reassign the virtual diskspace
again after the openSUSE install.
You can manually choose what to do. If you are just “cheking out” SuSE, I recommend leaving your windows part as big as you could, you can later repartion it inside SuSE. On the other side, that’s what I liked in SuSE better than Ubuntu installation: The SuSE installer will never get you wrong, will never delete your files, will never harm your Windows partition, which is cool if youre a newbie and have no idea what youre doing.
Vista’s Disk Management module will permit downsizing of its partition on-the-fly, probably to about one-half. IME, it is better to do this with Vista. Personally, while it probably will function just fine, I would not accept the installer’s partitioning suggestion, especially with a drive of that size. I would put the openSUSE root on a second primary (sda2) ~20GB is plenty (unless you intend to do sw dev), create a 3rd primary for /home ~30GB, and create a 4th primary as an “extended” primary in which you create a logical for swap ~2 GB. That will leave a sizable amount of unallocated space within the extended for logicals you can add for linux and/or Windows user data (e.g., shared FAT32 or NTFS partition(s), a ext3 partition plus a FAT/NTFS partition, etc.) This approach also provides more booting flexibility, always a consideration when more than one OS is on a machine (particularly a hostile OS, as is Vista).
Well I decided to do just that and am now a happy geek as everything is working like clockwork. Didn’t have to change anything out of the box driverwise for suse to work either
