[NTLUG:Discuss] Recommended partitioning scenario?

[Leroy Tennison]

Dennis Daupert wrote:
> My Suse 10.1 box lost its windowing system. This would
> be a good time to upgrade.
> 
> I'd like to do a dual boot setup, perhaps openSUSE
> 11.0 and Kubuntu 8.04.1. Does anyone have a
> recommendation for a sane, simple partitioning
> scenario? I've usually used a primary partition for
> /boot, another for /, another for /swap, then extended
> and sometimes separate logical partitions for /home
> and /usr/local. Now I'm thinking 1st primary for /boot
> (Um, can I use that for both linux distros?), one
> primary each for each distro's /, then extended, then
> a logical /swap, and one logical /home partition
> shared between the distros (would that work?). I'd
> like to try to Keep /home intact in later upgrades. 
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> best,
> 
> /dennis
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 

That sounds like a reasonable setup IF you know you are going to dual
boot only two distros.  If you think you'll want more later then
consider something like this:

Primary, bootable	/boot
Primary			(/User data, accessible regardless of distro)
Primary			(/home here if desired)
Extended
	swap
	root of Distro 1
	root of Distro 2
	root of Distro 3
	.
	.
	.
	root of Distro N


You can have the boot files of multiple distributions on /boot.  Just be
careful that two distributions don't install exactly the same version of
the kernel or one might overwrite the other.  A suggestion would be to
do an install, create a subdirectory under /boot and /boot/grub for that
Distro, move all install files (except /boot/grub/menu.lst or grub.conf,
whatever it's called) into those directories and update
/boot/grub/(menu.lst | grub.conf) to refer to the new locations.  This
insures that one distribution doesn't overwrite the files of another one
and provides a very unambiguous setup for referencing each
distribution's files in case something goes wrong.

You want your /boot partition to be "lowest common denominator" -
probably ext2 since you don't really need a journal on it.  Install the
oldest distro first, if you don't you could run into a situation where
the revision of ext? installed by the newer distro isn't readable by an
older distro.  I've hit that once.

Be careful after the first install, some distros prefer to "upgrade" or
install over any Linux installation found.  Also be careful to not
format /boot.

Another option is to have each distro in a separate partition and chain
load the second (and successive) distros.  This avoids the risks above
but you are going to have to do some work to have a common /home if you
want that.