Fresh Install

Jim Kernsey

HI

I'm going to wipe my hard drive in the next few days and do a fresh install of windows xp.

I would also like to install ubuntu on the same machine and have a dual boot system.

Which do you recommend I install first?

Has anyone done this, i'm fairly new to linux so any suggestions would be welcome.

Cheers
JK

Goodshape

Install XP first. Linux will accept the fact that you may have more than one OS and configure a boot loader on install. Windows will not.

Capt'n Midnight

If you are going to wipe the drive then you might as well nuke the partitions.

Linux can read NTFS fairly handy. But even with captive NTFS I'd still be wary of writing to the XP system partition. A Fat 32 partition can be written to by almost anything handy for sharing stuff.

have a trawl through the forum for recommended sizes.

One option is say 5GB FAT32 for XP system, 1/2 the drive for XP data - you install programs here and backup the XP system to here , makes recovery of XP easier. Then install linux in the rest. Oh and backup the boot sector when before and after Linux install in case you need to recover from an XP fix or reinstall.

Red Alert

I'd say a small NTFS XP partition, a small ext2/ext3/reiser partition and a large data partition formatted as FAT32.

Jim Kernsey

Thanks for the advice

I attempted to install my Ubuntu 5.04 but it doesn't recognise my harddrive?

I googled the error I was getting and apparently the hard drive i'm using isn't spported, so i'll have to have a look see for another distro.

I was thinking of putting the whole lot as FAT32, is this a bad idea?
I've 160gigs to play around with?

Cheers

JK

Capt'n Midnight

A single FAT32 partition is the second worst option IMHO, (NTFS being the worst) Linux likes swap partitions.

Do you have a SATA drive ?

Jim Kernsey

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

A single FAT32 partition is the second worst option IMHO, (NTFS being the worst) Linux likes swap partitions.

Do you have a SATA drive ?

Yes

Capt'n Midnight

Well Knoppix 3.9 works detects SATA better than 3.8

Post your PC/Motherboard/SATA card someone may have ideas.

oscarBravo

Ubuntu had no problem with my SATA hard disk and DVD drive. I'm using the Hoary Hedgehog release.

Red Alert

Your BIOS might offer the ability to make the SATA drive appear as an IDE drive. That's the only way I was able to install FreeBSD.

Jim Kernsey

Red Alert wrote:

Your BIOS might offer the ability to make the SATA drive appear as an IDE drive. That's the only way I was able to install FreeBSD.

Worked like a charm.




Thanks for all the advice

rsynnott

Bear in mind that FAT isn't actually very Linux friendly; it doesn't do permissions. You DON'T want a FAT home directory.