Partitioning question Suse 11 <<--Noob

Hello,
I recently installed Suse 11, 64 bit w/KDE 4 on my PC. I have 2 8o gig hard drives each partitioned in 2 with aprox. a 20/60 split. Xp is on the first 20 gigs of A. I formatted 20 gigs of B (E drive) specifically to put Suse. I thought it would use all of E if I let it do it on its own during the install but for some reason removed the drive letter but kept roughly 5.5 gigs as a Winders partition. So…in my experimenting with Suse I borked my system and want to reinstall Suse 11, 32 bit w/KDE 3+ (which hopefully will be more at a level I can deal with). My question is (finally) when I get to that part of the install how can I make it use all 20 gigs of E for my linux install? Thank you for any replies, I did a search but did not really find anything that answered my question.

Just click the Edit button in the partitioning screen and make the necessary changes.

You’ll get a screen something similar to this one:
GRUB loader problem… - Page 4 - openSUSE Forums

cheerio…

So…then increase the size of /Home to take up the E partition?? Remember plz I am a noob and have not done this before :slight_smile:

You can basically do as you like, just leave your windows partition alone.
Make sure you have your non windows HD as first boot HD in bios, and install the grub bootloader to that drives MBR. That way your windows drive MBR stays as is.

For suse you need partitions:
/ (that’s root - allow 10G more if you can, I have 20G)
/home (that’s your user side - make as large as you can)
swap (virtual memory - 1G is plenty)

You can use space on your windows drive for one of the partitions if you want. It’s a doddle. Just use suse’s custom partitioning during setup and you can see all the drives and partitions and edit as you like.

Double check everything!
Set mount points for your windows partiton like:
/windows
remember ‘do not format’ option in setup

Thank you, I think I understand. I will give it a shot. Can’t make it any worse than it already is (thankk goodness for Acronis True Image:))

M13 wrote:
> Thank you, I think I understand. I will give it a shot. Can’t make it
> any worse than it already is (thankk goodness for Acronis True Image:))
>
>
Hi,
I would like to warn you that Acronis TI 11 does not like the default
inode 256 size that openSUSE 11.0 partitioner formats ext3 partitions
with (it will report it as file system error and offer only sector by
sector backups). Choose expert mode in Yast partitioner and edit your
format options to use inode 128 size. Acronis also does not seem to like
some of the other extra options that Yast uses in that mode, so I would
suggest deselecting the two default preselected check boxes as well.

It is all working again, glad I went with the older KDE, many more options I prefer. Thank you for all the info. Peter,is there a problem doing the image sector by sector? I was thinking I found a good way to restore my system when I inevitably do something I am not supposed to with Linux/Suse.:confused:

M13 wrote:
> It is all working again, glad I went with the older KDE, many more
> options I prefer. Thank you for all the info. Peter,is there a problem
> doing the image sector by sector? I was thinking I found a good way to
> restore my system when I inevitably do something I am not supposed to
> with Linux/Suse.:confused:
>>>is there a problem doing the image sector by sector?<<<
I can not speak from experience but from what I have read from googling
around, it is a very, very slow process and produces large backup
images. I also use Acronis and find it is an efficient way to backup and
restore Linux partitions but it has some limitations, as I mentioned
previously, and one needs to work around them. Another workaround is to
pre-format your partition/s with openSuse 10.3 and install version 11.0
without formatting (in expert mode).

The following info is excerpted from Acronis FAQ web site:

What is a sector-by-sector backup (raw image)?

The sector-by-sector backup allows you to create an image of all sectors
of the selected partition. This image will contain not only sectors with
data but also sectors that are free. As a result, this image will be
equal in size to the disk being imaged, as there will be no data
compression. This method is useful if a partition being backed up is not
supported by Acronis True Image 11 Home or is corrupted. In this case,
all sectors of this partition are included in this image and will be
restored.

Thanks Peter, I am one of those people that lost data before and am anal about backing up, I back up all docs & mail with every shutdown, image all drives every week on an internal location & all drives once a month on an external .5Tb drive. So I have the room and the one time I borked Suse last week I reinstalled with no problems. However in my noob lack of understanding how Suse works I borked it again after a kernel update and when I tried to reinstall it would not work anymore. I think while it is still relativly a fresh install I will try and back up and reinstall the partitions a few times and see if I have any problems. Thanks again.