Considerations before you install

[emorrp1]

yes, you can do that, but make sure that sdb1 doesn't contain more than 15GB of data already (you can easily see how much space you're using within Partition Editor) Provided you don't shrink sdb1 to smaller than the space you're using on it, it's pretty safe. As for the rest, that's a perennial problem, everyone has different schemes. I favour the data partition method, i.e. you can label it "data" and then it'll show up in /media/data when you reboot. Open the /media folder as root, change the permissions of the data folder (right-click > preferences) to your normal user. If you then actually move the default Documents, Pictures, Music etc. folders to inside the data partition, you can create links in your home folder directly to the folders in your data partition, enabling you to continue using these shortcuts in other applications and they don't need to know the info is actually on another partition at all. Good luck!

[catilley]

Hi, Fred. I at first tried to dual boot, but like you said, the installer isn't always perfect. I have a 40GB hard drive with a 9.5GB partition for Windows XP Pro. That left around 29GB for Linux Mint. I don't know what the installer did, but it installed itself short of space. There wasn't even enough room left to update. Anyway, I bought this laptop to learn Linux on and after trying out a few, I'm impressed with Linux Mint. So I reinstalled, using the entire drive. This should give me all the room I'll ever need. Also, it has only 512MB of RAM, and my main laptop has 2GB with a 100GB hard drive. I feel that the system will perform better with one OS on it, given the low specs. Thanks for your advice, Fred.

[jaredfelix]

hm would it be safe to use the live cd to shrink the main partition and create a data partition after ive already downloaded a bunch of torrents? i really dont want to lose any data on any sectors of my harddrive...

i was going to shrink the main partition and create a new data partition then move my torrents to the data partition and then re shrink the main partiton again... i wont lose many data will I?

--thanks

[Fifo]

great guide. thanks. should have read this long time ago

i'd like to add that a lot of configuration files go into /etc not only /home. i've read that you can't create /etc (and /bin, /lib) as a separate partition, because it might be needed during boot, before other partitions than / can be accessed.

what i do is backup my /etc and /home folder (and some others that are important to me) using Back In Time. An awesome program available for gnome and kde. it uses rsync and chron to create snapshots of you files. thanks to back in time you'll be able to restore all (depending how you configure it) previous versions of your files.
i also tried timevault and flyback. they are nice but back in time rules!

i still keep /home on a separate partition.

[austin_john]

This is a very helpful thread and I have read it several times.

I have XP installed and am installing Gloria side-by-side, on a 500GB drive.

Using the most recent posts, I have used GParted Live CD to partition the drive:

sda1 Windows NTFS primary part 125GB
sda2 swap swap primary part 2GB
sda3 / ext3 primary part 12 GB
sda4 rest of drive extended part
sda5 /home ext3 logical part 50GB
sda6 shared NTFS logical part rest of drive

Now installing Gloria (here's the NOOB question): In the install program, during step 4, do I select "side by side" (and the installer will recognize the partitions and install correctly), or do I select manual and edit and respecify the "mount points"? It appears that I should do the second method.

Thanks - John

[Fred]

austin_john,

Looks fine. Use the manual option and specify the mount points for your pre-made partitions.

Fred

[austin_john]

Fred,

Thanks!

In editing the partition information, I can't tell how to specify the "shared" partition. Do I leave it as "do not use the partition", or specify as "NTFS" with a Mount Point of "/windows"? I have a lot of reading to do after install, so I'm not entirely clear how the "Shared' partition is used by both OS's.

John

[Fred]

austin_john,

For the sake of simplicity, I would suggest you leave the NTFS shared partition alone. Don't try to mount it or tell the installer to recognize it.

Then after the install is complete and you have familiarized yourself with the system a bit look at the link below and mount it wherever you like.

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=22093

Good luck.

Fred

[austin_john]

Thanks for the "real time" assistance! I will leave it out for now - as you suggest! Thanks again - John

[mikhou]

Fred, great post. Even though I don't understand all of what has been said above, it has certainly improved my knowledge of partitioning in general and Linux Mint as well. I've been dual booting with Vista and Mint for a few months now and have now made the plunge into fully operating in Mint. I am going to continue to run Quickbooks but only through Virtual Box. Last night, I installed a new hard drive and reinstalled Mint. I considered the idea of using remastersys so that I could have an exact replica of what I had been using but in the end decided to reinstall from the the original Mint 7 Gloria iso. I used your first "simple" partitioning scheme as I am fairly new to all of this and wanted to keep it simple. So, I've got a very small swap partition as I've got 4 GB of RAM. I've got Mint loaded in a 12 GB partition. And then I've got a data partition that mounts at /home. Here are my 2 questions. 1) Would it be better to setup another partition that would house the Virtual XP that I am going to install to run Quickbooks? How much HD space and how much RAM should I allocate to a virtual XP? 2) If and when I want to upgrade to the latest Mint distro, is there a way to do that without having to reinstall all of my apps that I have added on (VLC media player, truecrypt, xiphos, etc.)? Where are apps kept? Are they on the / partition or the /home partition?

I know that this is more than 2 questions , but they kinda wrap up into 2. Thanks for your help. I'm enjoying the opportunity to learn more about Linux.

mikhou

[ColJep]

When I discovered Linux Mint I installed Gloria on a test machine with two SATA drives. An 80GB one that I set up with a 15GB partition set as / and the rest unallocated space and a small swap partition. The second drive is 120GB and I set this as /home with another small swap partition. I intended to use the unallocated space to try other distros.

I am sure I did this from the install menu.

When Ubuntu 9.10 and Mint 8 Helena arrived it seems that this easy set up is no longer possible. Gparted runs fine from the live version but only one drive is shown when trying to install. I now have a trial installation using the whole of the 120GB drive and I suppose I can start disconnecting one drive, using Gparted from the new install and then reconnecting and mounting the second drive. A somewhat complex way of doing something simple. Especially when disabled and only having the use of one arm.

What fun.

[ninedragons1pearl]

I had installed mint 7 some time ago and deleted a xp partition and after creating the new partition I discover I had no permission to that newly created partition. At which point I backed up the data and created a entire partition for Mint. Can this be explained??

[piratesmack]

If you have 4 Gig. of ram on a 32 bit system like Mint, make a very small swap partition anyway, as the kernel expects to have a swap partition available. Not having a swap partition slows the kernel down in certain situations. For this purpose, there is no need for the swap partition to be over 256 KB at most.

I have heard that you need a swap partition at least the size of your RAM to hibernate.
I don't know if this is true, but you might want to add that if it is.

[Fred]

piratesmack wrote:

I have heard that you need a swap partition at least the size of your RAM to hibernate.
I don't know if this is true, but you might want to add that if it is.

You are mostly correct. I was thinking of a desktop when I wrote the original post, in which case hibernation would pretty much be a moot issue. I didn't make that very clear however.

It isn't a requirement to have a swap partition equal to or larger than your RAM in order to hibernate however. You can designate an alternate location to put the hibernation file. The default hibernation location is the swap partition or file however. It is certainly most convenient to leave it set to the default and make the swap partition large enough to be used to hibernate on a notebook though.

Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Fred

[piratesmack]

You can designate an alternate location to put the hibernation file. The default hibernation location is the swap partition or file however.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?

[Husse]

I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?

Ramdisk - isn't that a real logical error - put the swap in RAM?
Apart from the endless loop problem there might be...

[piratesmack]

I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?

Ramdisk - isn't that a real logical error - put the swap in RAM?
Apart from the endless loop problem there might be...

I got the idea from a rather knowledgeable person at LQ.
He said it's better than no swap at all and that even a small swapspace inside ram can prevent your system from locking up.

It sounded weird to me, too.
Still, I think I will try it. If it causes problems, I could always just add a swap partition.

[Husse]

Ah - but if you want a small swap just to make Linux happy you could try Fred's suggestion to create a swap file - not that i know how, but Fred knows

[piratesmack]

Ah - but if you want a small swap just to make Linux happy you could try Fred's suggestion to create a swap file - not that i know how, but Fred knows

Yeah, that's probably a much better idea.

I guess I'm just looking for ways to use all this RAM. Maybe I should install Vista?

[Husse]

I guess I'm just looking for ways to use all this RAM. Maybe I should install Vista?

You'd have to buy more RAM