Got XP Back..Now what?

[Tony Arnold]

Richard,

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 09:37 -0400, Richard Querin wrote:

> 1. Should I install Ubuntu on the same physical drive as XP? This is
> the only HD shown in the list of bootable devices in my BIOS. I think
> the problem I experienced this week in creating a dualboot system was
> complicated (not necessarily caused) by the fact that I had tried to
> install Ubuntu on the other physical drive and Grub didn't seem to
> cope nicely. 

I think in this situation I would have separate partitions for /boot, /
and /home, nt to mention a swap partition.

/boot is where all the grub stuff goes and I would put this on the
bootable disk alongside XP. /boot only needs to be tens of megabytes. 50
megs should be enough but others may have more accurate suggestions.

To begin with I would put the root partition (/) on the same disk
as /boot and also put the swap partition there too. I would make the
root partition about 10 gigabytes.

That leaves you free to put your /home partition wherever you feel is
best. But wherever you put it, I would leave some free unpartitioned
space around, so that you can expand what you currently have, or even
add another / partition for a test version of Linux.

You should select the manual partitioning option during install to do
the above,

When asked about where to put the boot sector for grub, the master boot
record of you sda disk should be OK. The install should spot that XP is
there and generate a menu from which you can boot either system.

> 2. I was thinking that I could use the 40GB on IDE1 as an extra data
> drive for Ubuntu or XP later on. I'd like to see how I do with Ubuntu
> first. What if anything, would I have to do to my Ubuntu install to
> recognize the new IDE1 partition if I decide to format and use it for
> linux later? 

It's a question of creating the partition and initialising a file system
on it, selecting a suitable mount point and then editing /etc/fstab to
get it mounted on boot. gparted will do the first two steps. The rest
are straight forward shell commands and editing to achieve.

> 3. Is this the smartest way to do things? I'm open to better advice. I
> need XP and I need the 120GB ntfs partition for video editing storage,
> so going all-linux isn't possible for me right now (that along with
> AutoCAD requirements).

I think most decisions at this stage really depend on what you might
want to do with the system later on, which of course may be completely
unpredictable, so doing things that leave as much flexibility as
possible is the smart thing to do. That's what I've tried to do above.
I'm others will comment, or shoot me down in flames!

HTH

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold