Formating & Partitioning new HDD (was Re: rawrite for linux)

[homega@vlc.servicom.es]

Please, do bear with me for a moment and help me go through it, thanks:

ok, so making images of Slack's boot (bareapm.i), root (color.gz), and
rescue (rescue.gz) disks seems to have worked (documentation says to make
images of all three files).

Now, in principle my initial idea was to strip windows from as much space as
possible (even getting rid of it for good) so that I could make space for
Slackware (that was with an IDE HDD of ~1.2GB, from which ~600MB belong to
Debian.  But this picture has change to better, I've just purchased a ~4.3GB
UMDA HDD (though the BIOS just recognizes ~4.1GB).

According to the Hard-Disk-Upgrade-mini-HOWTO, I can copy the entire Debian
system to the new disk (and the steps to go through seem to be quite
straight forward), allowing me that process to add more space to Debian in
the new partition.  Furthermore, I could spread the filesystem through
several different partitions (with the obvious purpose of being able to
share those possible between Debian2.0 and Slackware3.5, eg. /home, /usr?,
anyone else?

Then, of course, since Linux only allows 4 native partitions to be created
(1 of them will be a 128MB swap - I have now 48MB RAM), and I plan to make
several partitions for Debian (/, /home, /usr... ie. the ones I've heard
they can be shared), plus the partition for Slackware (and I'm guessing I
have to somehow "jump" creating /home and /usr during the installation
process), some logical and extended partitions will have to be created (but
just how many?  Say 2 native for both Debian and Slackware's /'s;  and 2
logical extended for /home and /usr (which will leave me with no chance to
create one spare empty partition, unless it's just right to make 2 extended
for both Deb and Slack).

Please, could someone comment and give me advice on all the process thus
far?  Also, how big every partition should be.

The Large-Disk-mini-HOWTO might be taken into account, although probably not
since partitioning the disk might solve that, am I right?

And finally (back to basics), to format and partition the new HDD (instead
of the DOS FORMAT and fdisk tools), I should just use the fdisk (or cfdisk,
which one?) and mke2fs tools (sorry, just thinking there's something
missing).

It would be great if I could get through and over with the whole thing
during this weekend, so I'll be most grateful for any advice, correction,
etc.


-- 
Un saludo,

Horacio
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homega@vlc.servicom.es
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