formatting your hard drive for testing

[Patrick Barnes]

Kenneth Geddings Jr. wrote:

> i want to set up my hard drive to have three partitions one is the
> windows xp home partition, one will be my main Linux partition (for
> fedora core ) and the other will be a testing ground partition so i
> can test out latest fedora core tests and or try out other Linux
> distributions with it. i am going to use the mandrake installer to
> format and resize my hardrive but what should i set the two Linux
> partitions as what file system? and will it be easy to delete and
> overwrite a Linux partition that i will use for testing?
>
> thanks
>
> Kenneth Geddings Jr.
> Associate Member
> Free Software Foundation
> www.fsf.org
>
I'm not sure if you've already set up Windows, but the best way to do
things, starting from a clean drive, is to install Windows first,
specifying the desired size for the Windows partition with the Windows
installer and leaving the rest of the drive alone.  Once Windows is
installed, start the Fedora Core installation.  Manually partition the
rest of the disk to your liking.  You'll at least want a root partition
( / mount point, ext3 filesystem) for each Linux installation and a swap
partition (has no mount point, 'swap' format) that the Linux
installations may share.  Your swap partition should probably at least
match your RAM in size.  Many people further subdivide the drive, that's
a matter of preference.  Once Fedora Core is installed, you'll be able
to choose between Fedora Core and Windows (labelled 'Other' by default)
using the Grub bootloader.  If you want read-write access to your
Windows partition under Linux, you'll need to use the FAT32 format when
installing it.  Support in Linux for NTFS is incomplete.  There are
projects to allow read-write access to ext3 partitions from within
Windows, but I can't name any off the top of my head, nor do I recommend
giving read-write access to your Linux partition to something as
untrustworthy as Windows.  After installing other distributions, it may
be necessary to alter your bootloader configuration in order to boot
everything.  I recommend using Grub from Fedora Core as your bootloader,
configuring it for any other operating systems you install.  I'm not
biased, it just works well.  You should probably create a Grub boot disk
to keep handy in case your boot record is overwritten.

-Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

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