Dualboot- Harddrive ID Question

[nightsky]

2 physically seperate harddrives for this DualBoot Sys:
Win98se 10gb maxtor on ide3
160gb Seagate on ide4 -this I need to format for Slackware10.2
Both hdds are setup as masters. Win=Primary Master and Slack=
Secondary Master. Since they are seperate systems when I fdisk
hdd for Slack do I begin w/ fdisk /dev/hda? hdb? hdc? hde? Is it
possible to make a mistake and windup fdisking the win98 hdd if I do not use
the write hdX combination? Is the win98 hddrive - hda and slack hddrive - hdb? I previously had win98se on the hard drive i am trying to format for slackware now. I am afraid to format the windows hdd by accident if I dont choose the right /dev/hdtags, is that possible? Thnx All help appreciated

[Statica]

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/partition-2.html should show you the device naming convention.
What do you mean by IDE3 and IDE4? Do you have 4 (or more) IDE controllers or are you talking about slave/master combinations for 2 IDE controllers?

[nightsky]

Hi Statica, Yes I have 4 ide connections SY6BA+IV mobo ide1,2 are 33 ata and ide3,4 are 66ata. So Hdd1 master is hde and Hdd2 master is hdg. Its weird? Also the new Slack hdd is 160gb - I have no clue how to begin breaking it down.
I know swap needs to be 2x 640ram = 1280mb swap...

[jglen490]

That "rule" about swap being 2 x RAM is not hard and fast. With as much RAM as you have, chances are 512MB is good for swap. As to breaking down the rest of the drive, you can do it one of several ways.

1) Leave it all as the root. This gives you the most flexibility, but on the down side it's hard to manage. If you need to/choose to reload, you could lose all that you and other users have in the /home directory.

2) Put /home in its own partition, leave everything else under root. The problem with separating an installation into partitions is crystal-balling what sizes they should be. It's amazing the "stuff" that ends up in /home.

3) Put /home in its own partition, /var in its own partition, all else stays with root. The only problem here is figuring out (again) what size to make /var. If you make it too small, your logs could eventually eat up all there partition's space and halt the system. Not tragic, but aggravating . This is my set up. As you can see it's not the most effective use of space, but it works O.K.

[john@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 5.1G 2.2G 2.9G 43% /
/dev/hda3 4.1G 3.0G 1.1G 75% /home
/dev/hda4 1.9G 164M 1.7G 9% /var

[LocoCoyote]

He doesn't eaven have the slices down yet.........I am confused with the IDE 3 and 4 thing.......
The IDE controller is on the MoBO or do you have a seperate card?

If this is the case (seperate card) and you have only two HDs and no more than 2 CD\DVD drives, I would do the following....

Disable the onboard IDE controlller in your BIOS.

If cable select is not an option, put your win98 on the primary master HD. This will be hda for linux.

Put the second drive on a primary slave. This will be hdb for linux.

put you cd\dvd drive on the secondary controller.

[nightsky]

Well thank you... the following is what I wound up with:
hdg1 = /root
hdg2 = /swap
hdg3 =/usr
hdg4 =/home
All are primary partitions. I created 1usr but am not sure what permissions I have. I have read at naussium about permissions, runlevels, mounting, kernel compiling and text editors but I am utterly confused. I set XFCE as the default desktop and bootup using the boot disk I made during slackware installation.
Seems I have to mount all my partitions each time I bootup? Starting w/command line, as root or usr? how do I mount all partitions? What are my usr permissions supose to look like? Are both usr and devices suposed to have different permissions? Runlevels, all I understood is that if u set it to 4
it starts slackware 10.2 in graphic mode and defines the system as multi-user? Help? I have tried getting help at linux forums but people respond as if you read all the documentation, (which is not self explanitory and does not provide basic explainations for beginners on how to work from a commandline), and you don't understand you are stupid. In short responses can be arrogant and I am starting to get tired of trying to learn howto perform common configurations and maintainance tasks. Oh well.. thanx again

[LocoCoyote]

You have me confused. hdg indicates the seventh IDE hard drive. While I have seen USB and SCSI occasionally go that high, this is the first time I have seen IDE do it. Perhaps it is a slackware thing.....I don't do much slack.

While you can put the /, /usr, /and /home directories on separate partitions (and If I remember correctly slack does do this by default....?) and while I know some who swear by this method....I recommend against it. Make a single partition and put those directories under /.

/etc/fstab will automate the mounting process. It is a simple text file with a relatively easy format. Google it to see how to put it into action.


May I make a suggestion? You seem very new to Linux. Dump slack (for now....nothing against it! Slack is a fine distro...just not newbie friendly) and get a copy of OpenSUSE. www.opensuse.com
It has a very easy installer and very good hardware recognition. I think it is more what you would be comfortable with.

One last note... I agree that there are some out there on many forums that are real unhelpful jerks. That is why this site is a step above that lot.....such crapola is not tolerated here.

Hang in there and don't give up! You will be glad you did.

[nightsky]

thank you lococoyote, reason I have hdg for linux is because of the linux hd convention. See my mobo has 4 ide slots, 2 are ata66 whichi I use for harddrives but those 2 ides are ide 3 and 4. Each harddrive is a master which keeps the dualboot an easy clean boot into either OS without having to alter the master boot record in dos. I just use a real simple loadlin setup. Slackware 10.2 is already installed and I can go online using XFCE. I would like to rise to the challenge of learining how to use a text editor and command line to configure, install and remove programs or apps using Slackware. I just need a starting point. I started out w/slackware8 3yrs ago but I had to take a long break for work, so forgot alot and everything keeps changing. I will just keep at it till I do it. lolol