New Dell Inspiron 9400: From Vista to Fedora/Vista.

[Jim Cornette]

Nat Gross wrote:
> And now...partioning...I need your HELP.
> This is what I did so far.
> 1. Used Vista to 'shrink' two partitions.One the real ntfs part where
> Vista is installed, the other a Vista recovery partition.
> 2. Booted the fc6 dvd and am trying to partion it properly, so that
> Grub (or similar program) prompts with boot options.
> 
> Here is how anaconda sees the disk (1 disk).
>                             MB
> /dev/sda1   vfat            55           1          7

Rescue partition could be saved.

> /dev/sda2   ntfs            7240       8      930

Seven Gigabytes sounds big enough for Vista. But with the 45 GB 
partition below, why the 7 GB partition? you might draw it to be part of 
the SDA3 partition and draw space off the later parts of the disk. This 
is just a suggestion. I do not want you to mess up your system so 
investigate why you have the two ntfs partitions.

> FREE                          3000   930     1313
> /dev/sda3   ntfs          45703   1313    7139
> FREE                        37349   7139  11901
> /dev/sda4  Extended    2048  11901  12162
>   /dev/sda5 vfat           2047  11901  12162

If dev SDA2 is not used for the OS, I would reformat dev sda2 to vfat 
and use sda5 for Linux space.

> 
> I need a swap partion, bootloader (in addition to the one there)?, and
> main / partition.

The bootloader can be installed in the MBR (Master Boot Record). The 
swap partition can be included somewhere within the extended partition 
container. (/dev/sda4, not real partition but information for sda5 and 
greater)

> 
> I tried letting it do everything automatically, but it complained.

It is an outright incompetent program for automatic partitioning. You 
are better off making a /boot partition in the early portion of your 
drive  of about 100 MB and a swap partition of about twice memory. For 
home I would use a regular partition and for swap and / I would put 
within an LVM. The LVM is good for stuff that is binary and pretty much 
the same on all systems where blowing it away would not be major. Your 
/home is for data which is different from computer to computer and 
should be on a traditional partition.


> Please advise.

Read  up on /boot partitions, LVM2 and extended partitions and suggested 
partition sizes.

Regarding VISTA, I like the resizing tool concept as part of the OS, the 
/boot partition they now have and the lower privileges for applications 
instead of admin for everything of helplessness for regular users. I 
hated NT4 through XP, so the reading of those changes is comforting. It 
will be sometime before I would have access to Vista though. I never 
used it yet.

Jim

> Thanks
> nat
> 


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