Boot setup

[skubik]

I'm on the process of planning a hard drive upgrade for my system, and I want to dual-boot Windows XP Professional and Slackware, but I'm not exactly sure what the best way of laying everything out is.

My design calls for the addition of a Promise Ultra100 TX2 ATA100 controller card, which will only have the new HD on it (either a Maxtor D740X 80GB or a WD 120GB). My current drive (Fujitsu 8.4GB), however, will remain on the first on-board IDE controller as the master drive. My CD-ROM will be the slave on that same controller. Then my CD-RW will be the master drive on the second on-board IDE.

The plan is to have Windows XP Professional AND Linux both reside on the new drive, the existing drive would be used for booting (with LILO), as well as hold webpages, databases (I do a lot of web application development), have a FAT32 'public' partition so I can access information from either Windows or Linux, and finally have a shared Windows/Linux swap partition there as well.

My question is, would this setup work? Since I'm using LILO as my bootloader, I assume all I'd have to do is tell LILO where Windows XP is located (probably /dev/sda1 since apparently the ATA100 controller will be seen as a SCSI card, correct?), tell it where the Linux kernel is (probably /dev/sda4 based on my design (the new drive will have 5 partitions, one for WinXP OS, WinXP Apps, WinXP Data, Linux root, Linux /home)), and everything should work correct? I'm just weary that Windows will be picky and not allow me to do that. Anyone know for sure? Any other suggestions?

Thank ya,

- skubik.

 

[HolyGrenade]

I haven't worked with seperate IDE cards in linux, but In multiple hard drive situations, I tend to make a /boot partition on the boot partition instead of telling lilo that the kernel is elsewhere. Tends to work out a bit more easily.

Also, don't you think it would be wiser to put the swap files/partitions in the new faster drive on the much faster controller. It may even make the system seem more responsive.

As for WinXP, I don't have that, but I've heard it is rather fussy about listening to what the user wants with multiple partition situations, let alone multiple drive.

<font color=red><i>I refugee from Guatanamo Bay,
dance around the border like I'm Cassius Clay
</i></font color=red>

 

[skubik]

Oh, I must have blue-screened there for a sec... it's been over a year since I last used Linux so I don't remember EVERY detail. :^)

Yeah, obviously I would put the kernel into the /boot partition itself, then just mount those partitions on the new drive, correct?

As for the swap partitions, yeah, they may be faster on the newer drive, but I've also read articles that say if you can put them on a seperate drive altogether, even a slower drive, it'll improve performance. Now, you're right, it probably won't be as good as if I had it on the same drive, who knows? There's a topic for debate. ;^)
The other thing is, I'm not entirely sure I even really NEED a swap partition since my system has 512MB RAM anyway, which is more than enough for me. Even with all my development apps open, MP3s running, among other programs running simultaneously (not to mention IIS5 and MySQL running in the background), the maximum RAM I've used (as indicated by the Win2K Task Manager) is 240MB. So perhaps I can forgo the swap altogether.

- skubik.

 

[poorboy]

If you're using a Promise card and share the drive(s) with Windows (and want to use it as more than just an IDE controller), you may be better off with RedHat or Suse. Promise only provides drivers for a limited number of Distros. Depends on what Windows makes of it, and whether the RAID funtion is enabled, I guess.

I find Grub a lot easier to set up and make work, so it could be work considering.

512MB should be heaps, unless you got some BIG databases and things going on. Certainly, it won't be thrashing the swap file/partition, so performance shouldn't be affected too much by the slower drive. But don't forgo it all together...