Quick Question

[ultra]

I'm doing the switch soon on my xp laptop(acer 9410z) to Linux Mint Daryna. I have two partitions on my laptop. One containing windows which will soon be replaced with Linux Mint. The second has all my files(movies..etc). Now my question is should I convert the second drive to linux format? Or does it matter? Cause I've noticed when I was using Amarok it would not seek that drive but it was able to see it in the File Browser.

[deadguy]

Daryna can read and write to both fat and ntfs!

so.. you shouldn't have to re-format your second partition to ext3 unless you wanted to.
of course then you would have to back up all your files as reformatting would erase them.

[catweazle]

As you have decided to quit from windows I would suggest to convert the data partition as well. You should backup your data anyway, so in that case it is no problem to use ext3.

In your case I would go for 3 partitions at least : a root (/), a /home and a third for backup. Better would be to have the backup on a second drive.

[deadguy]

As you have decided to quit from windows I would suggest to convert the data partition as well. You should backup your data anyway, so in that case it is no problem to use ext3.

catweazle makes a very good point here.

[ultra]

There's only 120 gb on my laptop and about 2/3 of it is dedicated for music and movies. Thanks for the quick replies. Much Appreciated.
I'm thinking of just doing 2 partitions for now till I get an external drive or a networked one. 120gb isn't much to work with, especially if you want to partition it to 3 drives. Or is it?

[vinoman]

There's only 120 gb on my laptop and about 2/3 of it is dedicated for music and movies. Thanks for the quick replies. Much Appreciated.
I'm thinking of just doing 2 partitions for now till I get an external drive or a networked one. 120gb isn't much to work with, especially if you want to partition it to 3 drives. Or is it?

I would put most of your music and other files on to a external hard drive or burn them on CDs or DVDs. Then you can play them when you like and they don't take up a lot of room on your hard drive.

I have Mint 4.0 on a 40GB hard drive with plenty of programs and I still only use 20% of the hard drive!

Enjoy Mint. After Windows, Mint is a breath of fresh air

[ultra]

I will do that eventually. I'm contemplating if I should build another htpc or just use my laptop and build a NAS. It'd be nice to have another cpu mainly just viewing movies and storing my files. External Drives are too slow and loud.

[deadguy]

Enjoy Mint. After Windows, Mint is a breath of fresh air

that it is indeed

[OU812]

I was having a similar dilemma. I have a few hdd's from a couple of old desktops and a new laptop with an 80 gig drive. After testing out some external cases for the hdd's and using them to back up data, etc. I decided to replace the internal drive with a 250 gig drive. I'm using the old hdd's to transfer files, and now they have all the files I need, and are now used as permanent backups. For the new laptop hdd, I have root, swap, and home partitions. These are small, but not tiny - plenty of room for the os and working spaces. Then I have about an 80 gig partition for my mp3s, etc.

john

[MagnusB]

3 partitions is not necessary. I would suggest keeping the ntfs partition with all your files and use manual partition to delete Windows, first create a swap (1.5 x RAM, or equal to RAM depending on how much RAM you got), and then use the rest of the free space to make a root partition (ext3, mount point /).
You could change the ntfs partition to ext3 later on, but if you don't want to backup all of your files now, you could just stay with ntfs for now.

[ultra]

3 partitions is not necessary. I would suggest keeping the ntfs partition with all your files and use manual partition to delete Windows, first create a swap (1.5 x RAM, or equal to RAM depending on how much RAM you got), and then use the rest of the free space to make a root partition (ext3, mount point /).
You could change the ntfs partition to ext3 later on, but if you don't want to backup all of your files now, you could just stay with ntfs for now.

I wish I read more into that earlier..cause I backed up all my files onto my htpc(xp), And for some reason it won't let me see the files..I get an error like can't read files or something like that.. Oh well I guess I'll just use an ftp program or something.. any suggestions? Oh yeah I've already got mint running but I can't seem to get the static ip address working properly for the wireless..roaming sucks! I'm putting the right ip address..but it won't seem to connect. weird. Other than that I've created 3 partitions: home:80gb,root15gb,swap1g. One thing I shouldn't have done is press the update all button on mint update..grrr didn't do any harm though..hopefully.

[MagnusB]

You have to use static IP? You can't use DNS? And what is your wireless card, or does it work on other networks? I for one always use roaming cause I need to connect to several AP, so a fixed setting is no good to me..

[ultra]

Ahhh.. I think I got it all figured out now. For manual.. I had to connect to my wireless connection first then change it to manual. I don't want to use roaming cause I keep on gettin DC when I'm in a different room.

Thx.