Dual Boot On Two HD's or One?

Rawn027 · Apprentice Joined: 01 Mar 2004 Posts: 286

I want gentoo as my main OS and windows as a 2nd choice OS.

Should I run Gentoo on its own HD and windows on its own HD or should I use one HD for both?
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AMD Athlon 64 1.8
1GB DDR 400 RAM
Nvidia 6600 GT

MacBook Pro Duo 1.67
1GB DDR2 667 RAM
ATI x1600 Mobility

slestak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jun 2003 Posts: 115

i personally would put them on two disks, if you have them. that will give you the most flexibilty later if you get more hardware to move the linux disk to another case.

0x001A4 · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2006 3:27 pm Post subject:

It's entirely up to you. I personally, would use one disk for both OS's and use the second for storage space exclusively. You can make the second disk Fat32 and then you can access the drive from both Gentoo and Windows.

Thats what I have now but Slestak has a good reason to keep them seperate, so its up to you

Voorhees51 · Guru Joined: 05 Nov 2003 Posts: 358

I recommend using 2 disks. Thats what I do, and it works great.
On the Windows Drive I make a seperate partition, usually ~5Gb as Fat32 so I can use it to store things, that I want to be able to access from both Linux and Windows.

xanas3712 · Guru Joined: 15 Oct 2004 Posts: 455

I went the route of having a storage disk vs. a os disk

I have my partitions setup like this

sda1 = /mnt/win1 - windows - ntfs
sda5 = /boot - ext2
sda6 = swap - swap
sda7 = (distro of the month, I just use this to try out different linux distros) - ext 3
sda8 = amd64 gentoo - ext3

sdb1 = /home - ext3

To access data from both OS I have the ext2fsd installed in windows so that it can read/write to the backup disk, but I rarely use that ability in windows since linux is my primary os.