Re: dual booting

["Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.rsc.raytheon.com>]

On Wed, 14 May 2003, james leclair wrote:

>
> Hello. Starting to get comfortable with Debian and am now looking to setup
> a dual boot with W2K. I will be starting fresh with a 20GB HD. So, I assume
> I would install windows first. Is this correct? Also, what reccomendations
> could anyone make regarding my linux partitions? 10 GB of this drive will
> be committed to windows, so, of the remaining 10 GB what should my deb
> partitions look like? Thanks all!
>

Yes, Windows thinks its the only thing in the world and must be installed
first. So you must create a partition for it first. You can leave
partitioning the rest of the drive for the Debian install if you like, or
do it at the same time as the Windows partition.

As far as how to partition for Linux, there are many different ways to do
it. Some of the most long-lived threads on this list have been debates as
to the "right" way to partition a Debian system. So, my recommendation for
a partition table for your drive would be:

  Name       Filesystem    size(GB)      Mount Point

  hda1       Win2K          10           (Windows partition)

  hda2       ext2            2           /
  hda3       Linux swap      1           (swap)
  hda5       ext2            1           /var
  hda6       ext2            6           /usr

In reality the appropriate partitioning scheme has a lot to do with the
use of the machine. I split out a separate /var partition for storage of
email but this depends upon the email load the machine sees. An
alternative would be to eliminate the /var partition and add its disk
space to the /usr partition. If the drive were bigger I would have a
separate /home partition for user accounts.

IMHO the partitioning scheme for a Unix system is very subjective so I
wouldn't worry about it too much. You could have just 2 Linux partitions,
hda2 for the entire system and a swap partition.