Dual boot Vista Mint with Mint on an extended partition?

[seba]

Hi guys,

I've installed Daryna about a year ago and at that time I let Mint do the works.
Now I have Vista installed and I want to dual boot with Elyssa.
I have made an extra partition of 30 GB for Elyssa using Gparted.

My question;
Is it a good idea to use Gparted and make an extended partition and then use the "manual installation" option to install Mint like this;

Sda1: Vista 63 GB
Sda2: Extended patition 30 GB, with the following logical partitions;
sda5: / 5 GB
sda6: swap 2 GB
sda7: /home 23 GB

Is this a good way to go or would it be better to just make 3 extra primary partitions for /, swap and /home?
Would it be better to put swap first or last maybe?
Final question; at the last stage of installation, there is an advanced option for a "bootloader". Is it needed to use this?
And if so, where should I put it? (I've tried and it's not Sda5: / apparantly )
I've searched the forum but have not found answers to this and I'm a virgin regarding extended and logical partitions...

Cheers, seba

[FedoraRefugee]

Hello seba,

You did not mention what else is on the drive. As you said you installed Vista I will assume you do not have any rescue partitions or anything else going on.

Your idea is good. The only thing I would do differently is shrink Vista down to around 20GB (40 or 50 with ultimate, there is a prob with the winsxs folder and redundant .dll's... ) and make your extended partition with / around 10GB and /home around 20GB. 2GB should be more than good for swap, especially if you have decent RAM. I would then create a third primary with whatever is left. Probably use GParted to create this as it will be formated in NTFS. When installing Mint just select this but do not format. Call it /data or something similar. This way you can share (read/write) your personal stuff between operating systems. I use this system on my main laptop and it works well.

You could create just primary partitions and just cram /home in with / if you wanted, but the former way does allow you to keep your settings when upgrading Mint. I personally just rebuild my /home by dragging the stuff I want to keep over to /data and starting over. This tends to be a little safer, through the years I have seen some strange things by carrying over /home. Nothing that cant be fixed though.

[seba]

Hi Fedorarefugee,

Thanks for the reply!
I think I will proceed with the extended partition as described and if I don't like it (missing the NTFS data partition) I will just reinstall the whole shebang; shrinking the Vista partition, making /home smaller and create an NTFS data partition as you have.

Could tell me if I need to use the "advanced" option at the end of the installation; the bootloader.
I really have no idea if I need to use that and I don't know where to put the bootloader...
I'll just try/trial (and error) in the mean time.
Thanks again and cheers, seba

p.s why have you made your / 10 GB?
Do you think 5 GB isn't enough for Mint and some extra programs or do you just have a lot of extra stuff installed.
(As I didn't have a separate /home previously, I don't know exactly how much will be left of / after installing Mint).

[FedoraRefugee]

5GB will be pretty tight. Even 10GB on a long term install is not large. I usually make my OS partitions at least 20GB. Trying to grow a partition is a major PITA.

It really depends on what kind of apps you will be running. Firefox and OO.o only should be fine on 5GB. Start playing around with all the free apps though and you will soon outgrow it!

Put grub in the MBR! It will pick Vista up automatically. You will boot through grub. When installed you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and change the timeout line to something comfortable or even comment it out with the # sign.

You can also boot through the Vista bootloader, but I have no clue on that and really see no reason. Grub is the way to go.

[seba]

Hi FedoraRefugee,

All worked out! Thanks for the help.
seba.

[freerk]

Did you menage installing Mint dual boot?
Our experience is that Vista depends on an original bootsector, so after install of Mint you cannot boot Vista anymore
Does anyone have solutions?
Does mint-in-win work?

Freerk Jongsma

[Fred]

freerk wrote:

Our experience is that Vista depends on an original bootsector, so after install of Mint you cannot boot Vista anymore

This is technically incorrect. Grub will boot Vista. There have been some problems booting Vista on some notebooks, notably some Toshiba models. The problem is with the BIOS however. Microsoft and Toshiba have a close working relationship, ie. in bed together. The BIOS would sense that Vista wasn't running and trash Grub in the boot sector. The next time you tried to boot, it would boot the Vista partition by default.

As you can guess there was quite a bit of complaining about this action. If you have one of theses problem machines try flashing the BIOS with the latest version available. That should solve that particular problem.

Also, OEM Vista usually, sometimes, has a separate partition that has to be booted which then boots the main Vista partition. If the installer doesn't pick up this extra partition, which happens sometimes, and tries to boot directly to Vista it won't work. The solution is to modify the /boot/grub/menu.lst and correct the partition the Vista chain loader stanza is trying to boot.

I hope this was helpful.

Fred