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  • From: "Anthony J. Albert" <albert AT polaris.umpi.maine.edu>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] repartitioning for linux?
  • Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 09:27:36 -0400

On 21 Apr 2004 at 22:07, Sindi Keesan wrote:
>We are putting together some computers for DOS and linux (with 3 or 4 ISA
>slots) each of which will have two hard drives and two sizes of floppy
>drive (which means converting one of the power supply plugs since we ran
>out of the regular styles unless someone has a better idea). The two
>drives are so I can have four DOS partitions and more than one linux
>partition (4 per drive). In DOS, after putting on software, I can resize
>the partitions with partition magic, or add or subtract partitions,
>without losing any data. I start by defragmenting the partitions so as to
>make free space at the ends of them.

My experience has suggested better performance from having each drive
be a separate OS, installed from the first cylinder (see end of
message).

>Is this true of linux? Can I format the entire 1G drive as one ext2
>partition, and then later, with say 300 M of linux files on the drive, can
>I split it into two 500M partitions without messing up linux? If I
>remove files from linux and then put more files on, do they go into the
>contiguous free space at the end of the partition, as in DOS while there
>is such space, or do they fill in the holes left by removing files?

As far as I know, you cannot do this - resizing the ext2 partition is
likely to require a reinstallation.

>I might want to use a separate partition for BL1, BL2, BL3, and BL4 or
>FreeBSD, for instance. I have not found any need for a swap partition
>since I have 64M RAM. We have run out of connectors for a third hard
>drive.

I usually swap drives or computers, when I need to do this... which is
rarely. But for what you propose, I might suggest making a smallish (
~500MB) partition for BL, and a larger one that can be used for misc
storage, or wiped and used for whatever OS you're experimenting with at
the moment.

>How have other basiclinux users ended up partitioning their drives and
>what sorts of operating systems do they have on them? Would it be better
>to start off with 2 or more partitions and split linux up among them
>(mount them all and if I decide I want to use more than one operating
>system, move all the BL2 files to one partition and unmount the others?).

I have the drive in my current notebook computer partitioned in three:
1. PC-DOS 6 (500MB)
2. BL 1.x (250MB)
3. Linux swap (50MB)

My "testbed" system, currently a P-133, has two drives, one 500MB IDE
w/Win95 & one 1GB SCSI w/Slackware 7.1 I'm going to be installing BL
3 on the IDE drive, when I get opportunity to do so.

Hope this helps,
Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert albert AT umpi.maine.edu
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
"This is only temporary, unless it works."
--- Red Green





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