• From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Topic: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Hi All :-)

I've just inherited a 200GB HDD and figured I'd take the opportunity to have a go at setting up a Statler Alpha 2/Windows XP Home dual-boot system. I've not used Windows since discovering CrunchBang, but there have been a few Windows programs that I've not been able to find decent replacements for (ActiveSync for my iPAQ PDA and Notmad Explorer for my mp3-player, for example), so I decided to set a little HDD space aside for Windows.

My questions are really about the partition scheme I'd like to use. I've never done much partitioning, especially not for a dual-boot setup, so I'd just like to make sure I'm going about things the right way. I have DuckDuckGo'd partitioning, but haven't been able to find anything that I can fully get my head around.

The partition scheme I'm aiming for would be something like this:

  • Rescue/Installer: 1GB

  • Swap: 1GB (I have 512MB RAM in this box)

  • /: 20GB

  • /home: 20GB

  • Music: 30GB (basically just a backup of my mp3-player)

  • Library: 10GB

  • Backup: 10GB

  • Windows: 20GB

That's a total of about 112GB. I'd also like to include space for another distro so that I can test/experiment/play if I feel like it.

So, how would you guys go about setting this up? I assume I'm going to need some logical and extended partitions? How should I create the Windows partition? Any advice about space for testing other distros?

Any input would be greatly appreciated - I want to get this right so I don't have to start from scratch again too soon :-)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-05-04
  • Posts: 250

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

From my own experience, I'd recommend installing the windows distribution first.  Personally I'd live boot #! (Statler) and do the partitioning work, then install windows (it'll probably want to do its own formating of its partition), and then install #!.

Its unclear what exactly you'll use some of these for--so perhaps a little explanation to the planned use of each partition would be helpful (esp Music, Library, Backup, Rescue/Installer).

Personally I imagine you could get away with a whole lot less on your / drive. 10 gigs I imagine would be more than enough for most uses. Likewise for a distro hopping partition.

Is there a reason to put the music collection on its own partition (likewise for the Library)? I'd either slip it into /home, or--if you need access to it on your windows setup--just keep it in the Windows partition and mount the windows partition in #! at start-up (pretty easy with ntfs-3g).

In short, I'd get the necessities on first (swap, / , /home, /windows) and then decided where you want all your media to go and grow out that partition to the remaining space.

IRC: PizzaAndWine     Script bits: Incremental Backup | Sleep Timer
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

jmbarnes wrote:

Its unclear what exactly you'll use some of these for--so perhaps a little explanation to the planned use of each partition would be helpful (esp Music, Library, Backup, Rescue/Installer).

Is there a reason to put the music collection on its own partition (likewise for the Library)? I'd either slip it into /home, or--if you need access to it on your windows setup--just keep it in the Windows partition and mount the windows partition in #! at start-up (pretty easy with ntfs-3g).

'Music' would be a backup of my mp3-player, which is a 30GB device. I've had problems in the past with losing/moving this amount of data, so I definitely want a partition for those so that they're all safe when I bork one of the OSes (which I inevitably do!).

'Library' (for my book collection) and 'Backup' (for misc. stuff) would server similar purposes.

'Rescue/Installer' would be for a copy of the install media. I was planning on installing from the HDD and keeping the original for rescue purposes in the future. I read somewhere that I could I have the .iso data on the HDD and have it appear in GRUB as a bootable option if necessary.

jmbarnes wrote:

Personally I imagine you could get away with a whole lot less on your / drive. 10 gigs I imagine would be more than enough for most uses. Likewise for a distro hopping partition.

I'm still fairly new to Linux, so it's good to get an idea of the sort of space required. Thanks for the tip.

Last edited by safetycopy (2010-07-27 17:57:42)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Based on feedback so far, my revised partition scheme is looking like this:

  • Swap: 1.5GB

  • Extended (ext3): 31GB contains...
    Installer: 1GB (copy of install CrunchBang .iso to install from HDD)
    CrunchBang (ext3): 10GB
    /home (ext3): 10GB
    Distro-hopping (ext3): 10GB (space to experiment with other distros)

  • Store (ntfs): ~148GB (containing folders for music, books, backup, etc...)

  • Windows (ntfs): 20GB

Does that look better?

Last edited by safetycopy (2010-07-27 18:43:32)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-05-04
  • Posts: 250

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

I understand your worry about borking an os and not having access to the data on it. Perhaps the easiest solution is to have one large partition for media (Music, Library, Backup folders inside it.) That way you don't have to worry about running out of space on one of them--this is the problem I've gotten into when over-partitioning. I'd guess that ntfs filesystem would be the best to share data between Linux and Windows. (FAT32 can work too...but you'll never be able to have files over 4gb).

Interested in the Rescue/Installer project (i presume it'd be #!?) Never occurred to me that you could install from HDD as long as you could unmount other partition you were installing on. Would be quite handy for I imagine. Have you done it before?

IRC: PizzaAndWine     Script bits: Incremental Backup | Sleep Timer
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

jmbarnes wrote:

I understand your worry about borking an os and not having access to the data on it. Perhaps the easiest solution is to have one large partition for media (Music, Library, Backup folders inside it.) That way you don't have to worry about running out of space on one of them--this is the problem I've gotten into when over-partitioning. I'd guess that ntfs filesystem would be the best to share data between Linux and Windows. (FAT32 can work too...but you'll never be able to have files over 4gb).

See my post above - I think we posted about the same time :-) I took your advice about over-partitioning and combined my previous partitions into one as you suggested.

jmbarnes wrote:

Interested in the Rescue/Installer project (i presume it'd be #!?) Never occurred to me that you could install from HDD as long as you could unmount other partition you were installing on. Would be quite handy for I imagine. Have you done it before?

My main reasoning is that my CD-burner is pants and it would be easier for me to work from the HDD than trying to successfully burn a disk. I have no clue how to go about this but read somewhere that it's possible. I'm still researching the idea.

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

OK, I found these instructions for installing from the HDD:

sudo mkdir /distro
sudo chown `whoami`:`whoami`
cp MYLINUX.iso /distro/distro.iso
#EXTRACT Linux_kernel & Ram_disk TO /distro#
sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
#ADD NEW ENTRY#
title Install Linux
root (hdX,X)
kernel /distro/Linux_kernel
initrd /distro/Ram_disk
Reboot and select "Install Linux" from grub.

I understand most of this, but am not sure what 'root (hdX,X)' refers to. Also, can I extract the kernel and ramdisk from the Statler iso?

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-10-08
  • Posts: 91

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Maybe you could look into Clonezilla. You can make an img file on your backup partition of your freshly install OS, then if any problems occur it is as simple as booting Clonezilla again and restoring from the img file big_smile

"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."
AMD PhenomII x4 955be, MSI 785GT-E63, 8GB DDR2, Radeon hd5570, Unity Gnomemini x64
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

^ Thanks - I'll look into that :-)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-05-04
  • Posts: 250

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ may be of use. It has a section on booting from a hard drive.

I have a new computer arriving today and will give it a go--it seems like it could be quite handy.

IRC: PizzaAndWine     Script bits: Incremental Backup | Sleep Timer
  • From: Austin, TX
  • Registered: 2009-11-17
  • Posts: 223

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

safetycopy wrote:

Based on feedback so far, my revised partition scheme is looking like this:

  • Swap: 1.5GB

  • Extended (ext3): 31GB contains...
    Installer: 1GB (copy of install CrunchBang .iso to install from HDD)
    CrunchBang (ext3): 10GB
    /home (ext3): 10GB
    Distro-hopping (ext3): 10GB (space to experiment with other distros)

  • Store (ntfs): ~148GB (containing folders for music, books, backup, etc...)

  • Windows (ntfs): 20GB

Does that look better?

I'm not sure if you need that much swap, unless you're doing a bunch of calculations. I'd leave it at 1gb, if not 512mb. If the two linux partitions share the /home, then you can probably push those partitions down to 7 or 8 and have a little more space for Store, but that's nitpicking.

As was mentioned before, don't forget to install Windows first.

About the 1gb installer, I believe you can use unetbootin to install a "live" CrunchBang on that partition, which would then allow you to reinstall/recover.

  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

The instructions I've found for installing from HDD are in post 7. I'm not sure if I need unetbootin. This is all new to me, so I'm winging it a bit :-)

I have created my partition setup now - it's pretty much as listed in post 4 above (other than a few tweaks to partition size). I also have the crunchbang iso on the rescue partition and have extracted the linux kernel and ramdisk from that.

The only thing I don't really get at the moment is how to get GRUB to use the stuff on the rescue partition. The instructions tell me to add a menu entry to menu.lst, but if GRUB isn't installed, that won't be there, will it?

Maybe I'm missing something - I'm going to look into maybe using the SuperGRUB Disk and will report back :-)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Well, it looks like I should be able to do what I need with the SuperGRUB Disk, so it's time to stick the HDD and get cracking - wish me luck! :-)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,724

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

The instructions in post 7 seem to refer to grub 1. The "root (hdX,X)" bit refers to grub's partition numbering scheme, which starts at 0 not 1 so (hd0,0) is the first partition on hda1 for example. (I think extracting the kernel and ramdisk is the sort of thing that unetbootin does automatically.)

However, if you installed Statler you've got grub 2 so there's no /boot/grub/menu.lst and it gets more complicated. Maybe SuperGRUB Disk will do it for you though. smile

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” - Master Foo

johnraff's Website

  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Yeah, this is not going according to plan at all :-D

I realized too late that the instructions in post 7 are based on having a GRUB already installed to work with, which I don't :-/

So, at this point I have Windows XP installed on one partition and the CrunchBang Statler iso on another partition, and am trying to figure out how to proceed.

I guess one solution would be to install a different distro on my distrohopping partition and go from there, but that kind of defeats the point...

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-05-04
  • Posts: 250

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

What about installing #! on your main partition. It will install grub, and from there you can work on your live-install partition? I realize this means using a CD to install #! which is what your were trying to avoid. However you could reinstall over your CD-installed #! once you get the live installation working.

I'm gonna try something similar when I get the time....just getting this new computer setup and ready for work has taken some time.

IRC: PizzaAndWine     Script bits: Incremental Backup | Sleep Timer
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

That would make sense, but I'm out of CDs :-D I have #!9.04 on CD, so maybe I can use that to get GRUB installed and then re-install Statler over the top?

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.

18 Reply by lv_

  • lv_
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: Manila
  • Registered: 2010-05-18
  • Posts: 24

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Why don't you go with LVM, ditch windows and just use windows as needed via sun virtualbox, inside your linux distro?

lv_'s Website

  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

This computer doesn't do well with virtualizing anything :-( Well, it's about good enough for a SNES emulator, but...

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • Registered: 2009-05-04
  • Posts: 250

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Hmm...perhaps. You should be able to install grub2 over the grub1 installation (thats what 9,04 uses) when you install statler.

Incidentally I just came across a tip at http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manu … n_harddisk that Grub2 autodetects isos. I tried it successfully with the sysrescue-cd ISO but without any luck with the #! ISO.

Of course--it's all reliant on having grub installed. I'm not sure that you can select which partition to boot from without it--as most BIOS I've seen only let you select the device and not the partition.

Last edited by jmbarnes (2010-07-30 01:12:23)

IRC: PizzaAndWine     Script bits: Incremental Backup | Sleep Timer
  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Well, I relented and picked up some blank CDRs today, so that should simplify things for now.

Last edited by safetycopy (2010-07-30 00:52:56)

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.
  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,724

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

Sorry I didn't get in before you bought those CDs, but in case you haven't burnt one yet, a couple of things you could try first if you felt like it:
* Boot into Windows, download unetbootin and use that to install #! Maybe you can point it at the iso on the other partition or maybe you'll have to download another one. Alternatively, temporarily install Ubuntu (on the unetbootin menu) to do your setup stuff.
* Use SuperGrubDisk to try to detect the #! iso and boot from it.

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” - Master Foo

johnraff's Website

  • From: The Chatsubo
  • Registered: 2010-04-03
  • Posts: 778

Re: Pre-Install Partition Scheme & Best Practices Questions

No worries, John - CD is burned and Statler installed, so I'm happy :-)

I did try the SuperGrub Disk, but didn't have any luck with it.

"Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?" Walt Whitman, 'To You'.