Baslinux mailing list

["Anthony J. Albert" <albert AT polaris.umpi.maine.edu>]

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