Partitioning in anaconda

[Petrus de Calguarium]

Frode wrote:

> Questions:

> 'Olde' knowledge says that only one primary partition can be visible
> to the system at one time. Is this not longer true?

Don't quote me (DQM), but I think this only applies to Windows. DQM, but I 
think grub doesn't care. I boot systems installed on partitions that are not 
primary all the time. I only have 3 primary partitions:

1 for Windows (empty), just in case I ever want to install it
1 for swap, exactly the size of the available RAM
1 primary extended partition (the remainder of my hard drive), which is 
subdivided into a number of logical partitions. These contain fedora 14, 
fedora 15, rawhide, my collected data (usually mounted to 
/home/me/Documents), etc.

I use this setup, since Windows will not recognize the linux swap partition 
(82), nor will it recognize the linux extended partition (85), nor will it 
recognize the logical ext4 partitions (83) inside the extended. Linux is 
entirely invisible to Windows, should I ever install it, and the Windows 
installer will not even recognize the size of the full hard drive, since it 
only 'sees' the first partition (type vfat or ntfs, so that the Windows 
installer can see it), which I reserve for Windows, hence the 2 systems can 
coexist on one hard drive. I don't have to worry about the windows installer 
deleting or formatting my fedora partitions.

> I haven't yet tried partitioning with fdisk first, but will try to do
> that tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a usable workaround.

I always partition with fdisk first. I create the layout for my hard drive, 
deciding all the sizes of each partition. I don't use logical volumes. Once 
done, I reboot and use anaconda's manual partition setup, to ensure that my 
layout prevails and that each partition is used for the purpose for which I 
created it.