Dual Install

Quick to answer questions about finding your way around Linux Mint as a new user.
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distoaddict

Re: Dual Install

Post by distoaddict »

The minimum space i've allocated is 5gb but the bigger the better.it depends on what your going to put on it but 20gb would be reasonable.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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AK Dave

Re: Dual Install

Post by AK Dave »

20gb is unreasonable. You'll safely put a full install in less than 4gb. Allowing some slop for anything you might want to install later, 10-12gb is ample. Putting Mint on an Asus EeePC doesn't require cutting anything out, and you get a full install in 4gb.

A 20gb install partition for linux is inefficient.
proxima_centauri

Re: Dual Install

Post by proxima_centauri »

It depends on how you partition your drive. If you have your files seperate from your install and system files then ~10GB should be plenty for "/" partition. Again, that would be for the system files only. Make it bigger, or create a seperate /home or other partition if you want to keep, or plan on putting, all your music, videos, files with Linux.

I have a 160GB HD and my partitioning is as follows
sda1 Windows 80GB
sda2 / 10GB **Currently with everything I need, 4.82GB used**
sda3 SWAP 2GB
sda4 /home 55GB
AK Dave

Re: Dual Install

Post by AK Dave »

vastpast wrote:What advantage would I gain from keeping my videos etc in a separate partition from Linux as opposed to keeping them in the same partition as Linux?
Two easy ones:
1. When you reboot linux and it does its automatic filesystem check, it is checking a smaller partition and thus booting faster every time AND if it detects the periodic need to "fix stuff" (common with ext3) then it gets the job done faster also. So #1 = faster bootup.
2. When you reinstall linux, upgrade a version, whatever, your precious pr0n collection is unaffected.
2b. Your precious pr0n collection and all those pirate mp3 files are easier to keep encrypted.
2c. You can unmount the partition that has your pr0n collection to disable system access to it.
Fred

Re: Dual Install

Post by Fred »

vastpast,

Ask you dad what the phrase, "don't put all your eggs in one basket" means. You will then have the answer to the question you ask AK Dave. :-)

Fred
AK Dave

Re: Dual Install

Post by AK Dave »

Let me tell you a story about an external hard drive that I have. Still have. 320gb WD external USB, 'bout the size of a pack of Vegas playing cards.

At home I plug it into a fileserver as a USB drive. Happy day, other computers can use it. It has a bunch of junk on it. I backed up my DVD iso collection onto it for "safekeeping" one day, and then since I didn't need those 8gb files stored redundantly on my laptop I deleted all but a choice few. These files were, for sake of discussion, file archives of DVD movies that I own on disc even though few (if any) of the iso images were created by myself and most (if not all) came to me in torrent form. I needed the drive to be, on occasion, portable. Thats why I bought an external drive. I needed the drive to connect to Windows computers when portable, and I needed a file system capable of storing huge files. So I formatted the drive as ntfs. One big partition.

See where the story is going?

So one day this XP computer has a barfbag attack and decides that my drive cannot be mounted. Linux says "your drive be scragged, find an XP box and run chkdsk a lot". So I did so, running chkdsk and rebooting to run chkdsk again (rinse, repeat) until XP was happy with the drive. Then the drive could be mounted, unmounted, moved, remounted, etc all without any problems. Except one. One folder didn't survive the ordeal.

Guess which one:
/portable/user/Isos

Care to guess what ELSE might be stored in a folder set aside for backing up isos? Disc images, created by myself, of legal installs of XP and Vista that I use on occasion for creating Vbox sessions when I need to create one from scratch.

Yeah, so about those plans to keep this one ginormous partition full of all your favorite stuff.

All I lost was bandwidth and time. I can visit isohunt or thepiratebay and find any file that was lost in my debacle. Even the XP and Vista images.
cyberglyph

Re: Dual Install

Post by cyberglyph »

I'm a complete noob when it comes to Mint Linux, but Windows I'm very good at. I would like to share my observations and maybe point out some things I learned to help somebody else.

I have 2 internal SATA drives in my computer.
500 Gig SATA 0 with Windows XP on that.
200 Gig SATA 1 with Nothing on it, I was using for general Data Drive.

I booted up the "Mint" Live CD and Proceeded to Install Mint(32) on the 200 Gig.
My plan was to "Dual boot Windows and Mint on 2 different drives. Is this possible I wasn't sure but I wanted to give it a try. I was sick to death of Windows and the crashes slow Internet on FIOS of all things! Ok I'm starting to ramble.
When it comes to the partition manager, I had to make sure I selected the 200 and not the 500. I used the whole 200. I thought Mint would need more space but It didn't, because windows seem to take up a big chunk of the 200 when I had it on there. Mint only took about 20 gig with applications! Not bad!
Anyway, I followed the prompts and the one thing you might want to do is make sure you check mark the Install boot manager under advanced. Make sure you don't change the designator hd0 to another drive I don't believe it will work. Just leave it default and check the boot manager. Thats it for that. Do the install by following the prompts and I had to make sure it was installing to the 200 Gig drive not the 500 Gig! After a few more really easy to follow prompts I was done! Not license keys, not bull. I restarted my computer with fingers crossed "i'm not kidding about that part" I was not sure what was going to happen. It booted to the Beautiful Grub manager and there it was Boot to linux or boot to windows xp, in a simpler matter of terms.

So without a doubt leave your Windows XP HD plugged in when installing Mint it will work just fine. I had no problems at all. Just go slow read every prompt to make sure you know what your looking at. If not look here on the Forums, that is what I was doing!

On a more personal note, I have not used Windows now for 3 days and I have not had 1 problem with a crash or strange lock-ups or really anything to worry about. I would suggest Mint to everybody! I still go to the same websites and they load even faster and all the multimedia intensive sites work just perfectly. So do yourself a favor and dive in even if its a live cd. The installed version is much faster than the live cd too!

Thanks for letting me voice and Mint team expect donations from me to keep this alive, I love Mint and the worry free that comes with it. No virus,No spyware, No worms, No Malware and Freedom!
AK Dave

Re: Dual Install

Post by AK Dave »

I want to emphasize that there are no reasonable conditions where you would need a 200gb partition for any linux flavor. A 200gb drive should always be partitioned down.

With your 500/200 dual SATA setup, a little forethought could have eeked you quite a bit of extra performance out of that system with linux. More than you already experience.

How so?

Well, the easiest is by putting /swap on a seperate physical drive from the bulk of the applications you use, and ensuring that both /swap and the applications are installed close to the drive periphery (the start of the drive or the edge of the drive, same thing). This second part happened by default when you put Mint on a bare drive, but not very elegantly. The first part would only have been achieved if you had undertaken to repartition that XP drive just a little to squeeze /swap in over there.

But all is not lost.

You'll get an even bigger performance boost by putting /swap on a high-speed USB2 thumbdrive. This reads like a desktop system. Buy yourself a $20 thumbdrive from Walmart. Make sure it has a decent speed. Something that claims "readyboost" is good enough. Plug it in, unmount it, partition it as linux-swap, and reboot. It should mount automatically, but if not you may need to edit your fstab.
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