On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@(protected):
> On Friday 02 May 2008, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > My Windows Vista laptop ate the big one from M$ and died under the
> > weight of Windows Update. The hardware seems to check out fine
> > overnight so I'm going to finally do dual boot on this machine like I
> > wanted to when I bought it.
> >
> > Data:
> >
> > 80GB hard drive
> > 2GB DRAM
> >
> > Questions:
> >
> > 1) What's the recommended order to install dual boot today. I prefer
> > to go Gentoo first, XP second. Any issues?
>
> All of this is mostly my own viewpoint from experience. There may be
> other ways:
>
>
> Other way round. Windows operating systems have a nasty habit of
> assuming they are the only system on the machine and merrily trash
> everything in sight for their own nefarious purposes. Then they
> overwrite any existing bootloader. I do this:
>
> Install XP. If you can get it to limit the partition size it uses, so
> much the better
> Resize windows partition downwards with Linux LiveCD. Most recent ones
> support this.
> Install Linux and set up a chainloader as normal in grub to boot windows
> Finally boot Windows and let it do what it wants with the partitions
> that need checking. This is expected behaviour caused by the downward
> resize
>
>
> > 2) What recommendations do folks have about splitting an 80GB drive
> > up. I'm thinking of maybe 50-60GB for Gentoo, followed by Win XP
> > using 20-30GB at the end of the drive. Partitions? I'm considering:
> >
> > sda1 -> /boot = 50MB
> > sda2 -> swap (unsure whether I should dedicate 4GB to this. That's 5%
> > of my drive and I won't likely ever use all of 2GB or RAM.)
> > sda3 -> /var = 2GB
> > sda4 ==extended
> > sda5 -> / balance of Linux side, say 55GB
> > sda6 == Windows drive C:
>
> Again, you have to take account of windows brain-deadedness and the even
> greater braindeadedness of windows "administrators". They don't expect
> boot partitions....
>
> I would allocate as little as possible for windows itself. Say 10G,
> which allows for the OS plus it's virtual memory file plus other cache
> stuff
>
> From sda2 onwards, lay out your partitions as for a regular Linux
> installation. Use your own preferences for swap, lvm, filesystems etc.
> Being able to share data between both OSes is useful, so leave the most
> space possible for data: You have two options:
>
> FAT32. This is gross and gives you no security. It's also the easiest as
> both OSes support it out the box.
> Ext3/ReiserFS: Better solution security-wise but requires some setup.
> You have to download and install windows drivers from sourceforge.
>
> There's a third option - use the ntfs-ng driver in Linux. It seems just
> silly to use this for your main data storage though.
>

First, thanks to everyone for the quick answers.

1) I'll go with Windows first. That's relatively fast and if I run
into hardware problems it will show up more quickly which is good.
Saves me the time of doing the Gentoo install and then finding issues.

2) If I do Windows first then /dev/sda1 will be NTFS. Does this change
how I install grub? I'm a little fuzzy as to where the MBR is. Is it
in the first partition or in a special area by itself? The commands
from the install guide is this:

livecd conf.d # grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
quit

I presume I'll use

grub> root(hd0,4)

to point at my root and still use

grub> setup (hd0) to get grub installed into the MBR?

Thanks,
Mark
--
gentoo-user@(protected)