New Dell Inspiron 9400: From Vista to Fedora/Vista.

[Nat Gross]

On 5/8/07, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
> Nat Gross wrote:
> > And now...partioning...I need your HELP.
> > This is what I did so far.
> > 1. Used Vista to 'shrink' two partitions.One the real ntfs part where
> > Vista is installed, the other a Vista recovery partition.
> > 2. Booted the fc6 dvd and am trying to partion it properly, so that
> > Grub (or similar program) prompts with boot options.
> >
> > Here is how anaconda sees the disk (1 disk).
> >                             MB
> > /dev/sda1   vfat            55           1          7
>
> Rescue partition could be saved.
>
> > /dev/sda2   ntfs            7240       8      930
>
> Seven Gigabytes sounds big enough for Vista. But with the 45 GB
> partition below, why the 7 GB partition? you might draw it to be part of
> the SDA3 partition and draw space off the later parts of the disk. This
> is just a suggestion. I do not want you to mess up your system so
> investigate why you have the two ntfs partitions.
Vista uses two partitions (this, unrelated to dell's own private
partition), one is a 'recovery backup' partition used by some fancy
new Vista backup/rollback scheme. Now, this was 10 gig to begin with,
but being cheap and thinking I won't use windows that much anyhow (the
main reason I need it is to test my Java software) I reduced that
partition. It turns out that for the sake of simplicity I should have
left it at 10 gig, and I have since used windows to set it back to 10
gig.

> > FREE                          3000   930     1313
> > /dev/sda3   ntfs          45703   1313    7139
> > FREE                        37349   7139  11901
> > /dev/sda4  Extended    2048  11901  12162
> >   /dev/sda5 vfat           2047  11901  12162
>
> If dev SDA2 is not used for the OS, I would reformat dev sda2 to vfat
> and use sda5 for Linux space.
>
> >
> > I need a swap partion, bootloader (in addition to the one there)?, and
> > main / partition.
>
> The bootloader can be installed in the MBR (Master Boot Record). The
> swap partition can be included somewhere within the extended partition
> container. (/dev/sda4, not real partition but information for sda5 and
> greater)
>
> >
> > I tried letting it do everything automatically, but it complained.
>
> It is an outright incompetent program for automatic partitioning. You
> are better off making a /boot partition in the early portion of your
> drive  of about 100 MB and a swap partition of about twice memory. For
> home I would use a regular partition and for swap and / I would put
> within an LVM. The LVM is good for stuff that is binary and pretty much
> the same on all systems where blowing it away would not be major. Your
> /home is for data which is different from computer to computer and
> should be on a traditional partition.
>
>
> > Please advise.
>
> Read  up on /boot partitions, LVM2 and extended partitions and suggested
> partition sizes.
>
> Regarding VISTA, I like the resizing tool concept as part of the OS, the
> /boot partition they now have and the lower privileges for applications
> instead of admin for everything of helplessness for regular users. I
> hated NT4 through XP, so the reading of those changes is comforting. It
> will be sometime before I would have access to Vista though. I never
> used it yet.
>
> Jim

Woops. The FC 6 installer dvd just ejected... hang on...
Good news, some hiccups.
With the partition, using anaconda I deleted the little extended
partition and created a new large one leaving about 3 gig free, 2 of
which went for the swap (2 gig ram).
I did NOT manually create /boot, and true to my hunch the installer
offered to install grub.
However, it seems that the installer also didn't know which is the
*real* Vista partition, so I manually told it, sda3 and not sda2 as it
thought.
Unrelated, the installer crashed every time I clicked on []Extras
repos. When I realized that was the cause of the crash, I decided on
minimal clicks and options thruout, and all completed ok.
Installer rebooted, finished setting up a non-root user, tested sound
ok, rebooted again.
grub gave me the option, chose FC6, booted only into mode 3 terminal, no gui.
Rebooted, gui came up login ok.
All laptop options nicely installed on gnome menus.
No kde option on logon screen.
yum update complains that another process is running yum. reboot,
still complains.
reboot to test grub --> windows. 100% ok!
windows part manager says that the linux partition is empty and do I
want to format it? ahem.
While typing this message [on another machine] (having rebooted again
into fc6) I get a beep from the gui updater that there are 233 pkg's
to update. I guess this sucker locked the yum file. Anyhow, I let the
gui do it this time.
whew. I need a break.
Thank you all!!
Feel free to ask anything related to this.
nat