Bruce B wrote:Brian,
Here are the [Sara's] conditions
I have a 120GB hard drive that I would like to partition for:
- frugal install of Puppy 4.3.0 retro
- XP (yes, I know, but I need it for some things)
- data to be shared between Puppy and XP
[ the drive was bare. Sara only ran DOS fdisk and format.
She is willing to change things ]
Her questions are:
- how many partitions do I need
- how big should they be
- what formats to choose
~~~
What would you like to recommend if you could? I'm not trying to
corner you, not at all. No two of us ever come up with the same
partitioning scheme. I am curious and I'll be pleased to tell you
what I'd recommend. Only I don't want to influence you by saying
in advance. Is this OK with you?
Bruce
~
Well, I'm not Brian, but here's what I did with my Windows XP system (IIRC, I have a 250GB drive):
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 744#521744
Given a bare 120 GB drive, with XP to be installed, I would probably:
Partition 1) a 15-20 GB piece as NTFS -- install WinXP here.
Partition 2) a 120 GB minus 1GB, minus 15-20 GB formatted NTFS.
Partition 3) 1 GB Linux swap.
(that should add to 120 GB, if the math was right).
Or, alternatively I would make 4 partitions, basically as shown in my post above (noting that 1 GB of swap should be plenty).
Then, after installing XP and getting it fully functional and up to date, and installing a Puppy and Lin'N'Win setup, but before filling up partition #2 with other user files, I would perform a full backup using a tool such as Clonezilla (onto an external drive). Now you can restore a functioning system to a new, bare drive if needed.
The Frugal Puppy could reside on either partition, at your option. If you're going to place Puppy on the 1st partition, I would lean towards the larger size for #1 (since Puppy will eat up a chunk of disk space nearing 1GB).
All the user files (documents, pictures, movies, music, etc) are to be stored on partition #2 -- which makes incremental backups of the OS partition easier, since you're not loaded with other junk. And partition #2 should be backed up (i.e. simply copied) to an external drive periodically...
Of course, there would really be nothing wrong with 119GB NTFS partition, 1GB swap (using the entire drive in 2 partitions). Given that, I would boot Puppy, and use gparted to resize the main partition down by 1GB, and add the 1GB swap...
We should also note that multiple Frugal Puppies can be installed, each in their own folder.
And lastly, the Lin 'N Win instructions are easier if you boot up your Puppy to install, and perform the required file editing from there (since you don't need to un-hide, and un-protect the system files to modify them -- I would, however, make a copy of them before editing...just in case).
BTW:
http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwi ... innwin.htm
And when you get to this step, being booted from Puppy, you can directly edit the boot.ini file:
http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwin/step2-xp.htm