Hello,
i have two 250gb hard drives.
hard drive one at this time has two partitions, one 50gb partition for vista and the rest for my data.
hard drive two is just one partition and is used for backups.
thinking about eiether shrinkin the the vista partition or shrinking the data partition on disc one.
my computer specs are as follows
intel quad core Q6600
2gb of ram
nvidia 8800gt graphics card
asus p5k wifi ap motherboard.
creative x-fi sound card.
can i have a relitively small home partition and store most of my data on my ntfs partition?
what is a reccomended size for the root partition?
with a net install of opensuse with the default install grub to the mbr and also put vista on the bootloader?
Yes. You do the install. Then mount the ntfs partition/s in like /home/yourusername/windows1 and /home/yourusername/windows2 for example. You mount them permanently using a moujnt in fstab.
More here: HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access in openSUSE 10.x
Be aware though that it’s quite unusual and not often done – so the consequences are really not known. Sometimes the mounts jack up and refuse to mount for ntfs. and you have to reboot into windows and run chkdsk to clear the situation. Better to be independent of NTFS IMHO, but the short answer to your question is still “yes”
About 15 Gb plus 15Gb for /home but less on /home if a lot of stuff is in the windows partitions.
Hello swerdna,
thank you for your reply.
all i need from my data partition is my music.pictures and word documents. the rest is mainly windows install files anyway. so i can just copy my music and word documents over to my home partition.
would you normally store loads of data on a home partition?
or would you setup another partition if you was going to store loads of data?
what size do you reccomend for the swap file? bareing in mind i have 2gb of ram
Hi again
There’s not much point (IMHO and excepting special circumstances) in swap > 2 GB. And when RAM is small ~1/2GB the conventional wisdom is 2xRAM. Putting that in the mental blender gives: if you have 2GB RAM I recommend 2 GB swap.
I would normally store LOADS of data on my /home partition. BUT I also have a whole other drive with one partition formatted as ext3 which I mount in my home folders at location /home/john/storage PLUS a backup drive where I use a cron job twice a week to backup everything under /home as a tar file. Plus I like to dig into my NTFS partition from time to time and have that mounted in /mnt/windows using a line in fstab and the ntfs-3g driver to mount it read/write (despite the risks).
So in answer to your question: “would you setup another partition if you was going to store loads of data” – It depends what storage you have distributed around your inbternal and external drives. You can be as centralised or as decentralised as you like. But I recommend you implement a good backup protocol after the dust settles.