Hello
I was looking at the tutorial in the HOW To Section and had a few questions.
I currently installed a clean copy of Vista home premium (restore disc from HP). Once installed, I did all the updates and included a disk defragment. I have a 160gig hd. 8.28(drive D) is for system restore and 140(drive C) which is for the windows.
– I have two question.
Do i need to uncheck the button that says"automatic configuration"
What should my partition look like, and how would I accomplish the following.
-1. 60Gb for Windows partition(Drive C)
-2. Leave the 8.28gb for restore…i dont mind deleteing this. I have burned the disc. If possible, then add to the 65gb of free space
-3. 15Gb for Suse11.1
-4. 140-60-15= 65gb for free space. or 65+8.28 if possible.
I am new to this, so please correct me if I have something incorrect. Also, what is swap? I hope to install this tomorrow, just downloaded the new 11.1 today. thank you
Not sure which button you mean but you MUST use Vista to create the spare partition. Do not use the openSUSE installer to create the initial partition.
When you get to installing, check that openSUSE is going to write to the spare Vista parition. If it is, leave it to the installer to create the three Linux partitions you will need.
/ holds all your system files
/home holds all your personal and personal configuration files
/swap is a special partition which is used as an extension to memory
If it looks as if openSUSE is intending to use the wrong partition, you will need to use the expert partitioner. In this case 10G for /, 1G for swap and the rest for /home should work. You will also need to mount your Vista partitions with something like:
/windows/C and
/windows/D
at the same time as you use the expert partitioner. Otherwise, you will find you cannot read any of your Vista partitions when you are using openSUSE.
If you have defraged vista, then suse can and will use free space to create partitions. I let it do so with my laptop just to see how it would go. Suse got everything right, but of course I could see that so I just let it go for it. It chose to create an extended partiton, still leaving Vista plenty to go at, and within the new extended it put (/) (/home) (swap).
I have also done the install using custom partitioning. Having as you do, Vista and a Recovery Partition. I used Parted Magic to Partiton the free space. This way you get exactly what you want. Grub to MBR. No problem.
Anyway, if you have a backup and also recovery disks. Give it a go. See what the suse installer does by default, you can always back out if you don’t understand.
I shrunk Vista C: to, initially with Vista’s own tools but it wouldn’t slim itself down to less than 160GB. It made no ‘spare partition’ just free space, that I could have used to make partitions in.
So then I let the OS 10.3 tools rip on it, and it worked fine, was able to squeeze it down to 40GB or so, and no re-activation problems (unlike after initial install).
So I wonder to why john_hudson says “Not sure which button you mean but you MUST use Vista to create the spare partition. Do not use the openSUSE installer to create the initial partition.”
Well Vista is errr Vista… it’s about as good (broken?) as it’s ever been, and it launches some applictions that favour that OS other superior FOSS solutions.
I did all that 1 year ago, and it didn’t mind at all. I have actually allowed it a bit more room, can’t remember if I did the Grow with Vista’s tool, but I think I used the YaST Partitioner.
So in this case I got to keep only 1 piece, not several of them. In this case I get to say “Works for me!”
