Installed Partition Magic on XP pro C: drive and followed instructions to make a backup, which involved using a couple of floppies. Once I had actually found a pair of floppies, I produced the backed up and then I replaced the floppy drive with a 2nd hard disk as this is the first time I had used a floppy in what must have been years. I proceeded to defrag the C: drive, which squashes all the data on C into the lower numbered cylinders, thus enabling it to be safely re-sized with Partition Magic. I shrank drive C: from a 55Gb to a 7 Gb partition.
Boot from SuSE 8.0 installation CD/DVD. Select all the appropriate options/settings. E.g. timezone, keyboard. Then opted to manually edit partitions. With a two disks, one of 60Gb and one of 20Gb, I opted for the following layout: -
/dev label fs fstab options disk1 (Gb) disk2 (Gb) hda1 Dell Utility*1 ? hda2 XP pro C: NTFS *2 ro,noauto,user,umask=022*3 7 hda5 /boot*4 ext2 defaults 0.5 hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 hda7 /home ext3 defaults 12 hda8 /opt ext3 defaults 8 hda9 /usr/local ext3 defaults 8 hda10 swap2 swap pri=42 *5 0.5 hda11 XP pro F: vfat *2,3 rw,noauto,user,umask=022 8 hda12 /usr ext3 defaults 10.8 hdc1 XP pro E: NTFS *2,6 ro,noauto,user,umask=022 4 hdc2 swap1 swap pri=42 *5 0.5 hdc5 /tmp ext2 defaults 1 hdc6 /var ext3 defaults 1 hdc7 /srv ext3 defaults 2.5 hdc8 /home/dean/home/camera ext3 defaults 9.5
- Dell's 50K partition, Id of 0xde, for what ?.
- XP pro will only use primary partitions. Linux does not care if a partition is primary or exteneded, so all linux partitions will be extended.
- Current, recommended, linux implementation of the NTFS driver is Read ONLY. An experimental writable driver exists.... So to make one of the XP partitions safely writable from linux use of the vfat filesystem is recommended!
- Must be in first 1024 cylinders for lilo/BIOS limits.
- Equal priority (hence OS will use first available.)
swapon -s or any of the many GUI utilites, will display swap usage to verify that linux finds, and uses, all swap devices at boot up.- D: is grabbed by XP for the CDRW/DVD drive.
The above is overkill (e.g. /usr and /usr/local could easily be one partition.) The other infrequent changing partitions (/srv, /opt, /local could also have been subsumed by others…) however, having more than necessary is easier to manage than having too few.
Installation then proceeds to format the Linux partitions with the selected filesystems. After partitioning and Linux install, we continue with selection of desired rpm packages. SuSE installation DVD failed to find any rpm packages at all! Cleaned the DVD and started again. No joy. Finally gave up and used the CD ROMS instead. This worked and only took about 2 hours in total (including selection of rpms and the swapping of CDs.)
Once I had the basic system running I was able install further rpms from the DVD with no problems. So it was not a problem with being able to read the installation DVD, it would seem to be a problem with the actual linux installation via DVD (for my setup ?).
N.B. Same DVD issue with SuSE 8.1 (and SuSE 8.2 …)Booting installed Linux:- 'Calibrating delay loop... 3971.48 BogoMIPS'. Wow !
After getting a stable-ish system it is now time to tune the hard disks. After a little playing, mainly with hdparm, I now use the following: -
hdparm -d 1 -X udma5 -c 3 -m 16 -k 1 /dev/hdc
hdparm -d 1 -X udma5 -c 3 -m 16 -k 1 /dev/hda
The values are specifically for MY machine, yours will almost certainly differ. These hdparm commands are configured in /etc/sysconfig/ide which is parsed and fed to hdparm by /etc/rc.d/boot.idedma.
DEVICES_FORCE_IDE_DMA="/dev/hda:udma2:-m16:-c3 /dev/hdc:udma5:-m16:-c3"