WinXP, Gentoo & 2 hard drives, suggestions?

John2583

I have just finished building a new PC. specs: Asus A7N8X deluxe, NVIDIA GeForce4 TI4200, DVD and CD-R/RW drive. 20GB harddrive and 80GB hard drive(which is the master). I have been thinking about how I want to do this for a while. I want to have one OS on one hard drive and One OS on the other. I want a FAT32 partition on one hard drive so that I can share data between the OS's. I have System Commander 2000, which will allow me to make a FAT32 partition. I think I want to put gentoo on the 80GB drive and have a 20GB FAT32 partition on the 80GB hard drive. I would like Windows XP Pro on the 20GB hard drive. So how should I go about doing this? I've done a dual boot system before, but I've never installed gentoo. Should I install WinXP on the 20GB HDD first?, then make a FAT32 partition on the 80GB HDD? Does it matter which HDD I install the bootloader on(Usually master, right?)

Mirage Indigo · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 14

I'm still in the middle of installing on a brand new A7n8x deluxe with a 2600+, and a seagate 80G. Also with a XP dual boot.

So far I've discovered the gentoo cd auto network card detect doesNOT like the 3COM chip, only the Nvidia onboard seems to work.

I had a reasoable install (I did a stage 1, so it tooka LONG time). Now I'm ironing the kinks out. Be sure you FDISK your disk BEFORE installing XP. And also, you may wish to use soemthing other than NTFS for the XP partition as Linux only does Read Only for NTFS.

Let me know how it goes.
-Matthew

John2583 · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:26 am Post subject:

so you're going to install gentoo first? then put XP on? I had planned on installing XP using NTFS so it would perform well and having a FAT32 partition to share between gentoo and XP. I'm sure all of this can be done, but I'm not sure how to go about it.

zenon · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 263

I'm doing the same thing, are you SURE linux can only read NTFS? I sure hope there's a hack/patch/workaround

I had WinXP installed on a 10 Gig then I imaged drive-to-drive with Norton Ghost and did a part. resize with Partition Magic. So on the new 60 gig I have 2 NTFS partitions both 30 gig big.....

The Linux 10 gig has 100MB boot part (ext3) then 500 MB swap partition (swap) and the balance is for Linux (RieserFS)

Here's the twist tho hehe listen carefully it's pretty cool

Okay, I have a T-Bird 1.2 with 256MB RAM.
At the ends of the 60 gig and the 10 gig there is 200MB of free space, when everything is up and running (right now the linux side is in shambles, read my post below and offer any kernel tips if you have them pls.) I'm going to format those two partitions as striped dynamic partitions....

WinXP can software stripe drives just like Linux so my swap file will be uber fast in XP... Maybe when I'm a full-fledged penguin head I'll bomb XP toss Gentoo on the 60 gig and look into stiping the swap on the 60 the 10 and another 60, then Stripe the two 60's (I'm into audio creation so my HD's are never fast enough

)

zenon · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 263

Oh, Gentoo didn't detect my Realtek 10/100 card either... They need to take a look @ how RH does some of it's install stuff, I found RH to install smoother than Windows.

Valen · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 10:22 am Post subject:

I've always done my dual boots as XP first then linux, since installing grub (or lilo if you really want to) is part of the linux install process it makes it easier to have everything ready when you get to that step.

There is an experimental NTFS write option in the kernel config but it does very strange (read bad and unpredictable) things the last time I checked.

Mikey · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 12:51 pm Post subject:

I agree with Valen. Make the 20 Gig drive your master and install XP first on the master.

When you boot from CD to install Gentoo, the fdisk utility will let you partition the 80 GIg drive anyway you want to. Creating a FAT32 partition for passing files between OSes is a good idea. I would not trust writing to the NTFS partition from any Linux installation.

The dual boot utility GRUB will let you default to whichever OS you want. Having Gentoo on the slave drive is not a problem. You'll never know the difference. You'll never see the Linux partitions in XP. (I don't think Bill likes them.

)

Make sure you can configure your network connection. I have a Asus P4PE motherboard with a Broadcom network chipset. The kernel does not support this, but fortunately Broadcom does. I had to use the alternate installation procedure. I installed Red Hat into a small partition, compiled and installed the network driver from the P4PE CD-ROM, and then used Red Hat to install Gentoo. I was then able to compile and install the network driver in Gentoo. You could install Red Hat in the future FAT32 20 Gig partition, use it to install Gentoo, and then blow Red Hat away.

If your motherboard is new hardware the Linux kernel may not support it. I was able to get my network connection working only because the manufacturer provided a Linux driver. I still haven't found a driver for the on-board SoundMAX audio chipset the P4PE has on it.
_________________
Mikey

zen_guerrilla · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 343 Location: Greece

Darth_Daver · n00b Joined: 22 Sep 2002 Posts: 44

I hope this helps.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=18319&highlight=

I recommend FAT32 for WinXP, depending upon your requirements and whether you are more a Windows person or a Linux person. FAT32 lets you write to the partiton from Linux. Last I heard, NTFS support was still read only, although I have heard unconfirmed rumblings that write support exists.

John2583 · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 8:23 pm Post subject:

Thanks! This is the info I needed. Now I'm going to download Red Hat 8.0 incase I need it, but there are 5 CDs!!!! I don't need them all right? And I looked on the NVIDIA CD that came with my motherboard(for the nForce2 chipset) and It has a linux driver for the 3com network.

lost_packet · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 19

Last I heard, NTFS support was still read only
no kidding?
I have a post where I was getting a zero table message and only given read priv when trying to run cfdisk on a ntfs partition......no one mentioned that gentoo didn't support ntfs.

xenon · Guru Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 432 Location: Europe

zenon · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 263

What's the big deal with NTFS? I was under the impression that Linux supported all the FS' under the sun... everyone is putting Win2k and XP on NTFS it's not like NTFS is obscure or anything, FAT32's dead.

scocou · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject:

The best way is to install them is with their own respective boot loaders on their own physical drives, then select your boot drive with <esc> or whatever at POST. This is for your two physical drives situation, I'd do something different otherwise... If you do it this way it doesn't matter if they like one another's boot loaders, they'll stay away from each other. Obviously I'd put a vfat(fat32) partition on my big drive, who cares what OS it's under...
BTW - Gentoo DOES support NTFS and any other filesystem the Linux kernel supports, but you have to include support when you build your kernel.
BTW2 - If file system performance is a concern (ie fat32 is obselete) why would you mention NTFS??? It sucks IMO, try xfs if you want something high performance... Windows is obsolete...

gwydion · Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2003 11:30 pm Post subject: swap space on alt drive

the only suggestion I'd add to the previous posts is to set up the respective swap space for both os's on the alternate drive, i.e. have a small reiser/ext<whatever> partition on the 20G for gentoo's swap, and configure XP to put its swap file on the 80G, either on a data partition that you put there, or a small FAT32/NTFS partition just big enough for the swap. This allows faster synchronous r/w from swap while using the os, and will generally speed things up a bit. I've done this on every install of whichever os I was running at the time for the past 5 years or so.

gl, and happy gentooing

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Linux User #223670

Darth_Daver · n00b Joined: 22 Sep 2002 Posts: 44

Darth_Daver · n00b Joined: 22 Sep 2002 Posts: 44

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

NTFS. Defragments faster, does not fragment as fast. HPFS based... HP being High Performance. Too bad OS/2 died with it.

FAT32 is for hard disks less than 2TB, but it is overhead for hard disks less than 1.5GB and was not designed with partitioning in mind.

By the way, MSDOS does not know how to read NTFS. So the only OS capable of reading NTFS is NT.

Last I checked, Linux supported NTFS 4 as readonly, no news about NTFS 5. XP uses NTFS 5.

I wonder when I'll get around to dumping Windows... I hope that my Computer Studies teachers don't try to teach me VB and MFC, that's going to severely limit my ability to work on homework.

rajendra82 · n00b Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 46

I have dual booting XP/Gentoo setup with NTFS 5 on the first primary partition. When compiling the Gentoo kernel, you can enable NTFS read support and NTFS write support. NTFS read support is described as follows: