Hard Drive Partitioning suggestions please.

[iank_]

Hi All,

I have a 60GB drive on my laptop that I would like to setup with Dual boot BT and XP and a Data partition.
All the instruction I have found for setting up BT suggest that 3 Primary partitions is the way to go.

This is what I was thinking.

1 * 20 gb NTFS XP (Primary Partition)
1 * 50 mb Linux Boot (Primary Partition)
1 * 1 GB Linux Swap (Primary Partition)
1 * 15 GB Linux BT (Primary Partition)
1 * FAT partition with what is left.

As you can see the problem is that I have no partitions available for the FAT partition.
How do I go about solving this problem? Can I combine some of the partitions and make logical partitions with in them, or something like that.

I have looked at both the Duel boot film(which the sound is corrupt on buy the way) and the triple boot instructions but neither of them seem to be what I need.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
ink

[purehate]

If you make your fat data partition a logical extended partition it will work because then you only have 4 primary partitions.

[Dark Ragnarok]

Here's a suggestion. Don't worry about a boot partition. Just install backtrack without it and have /boot on the same partition as Backtrack. It's easier and for future works it ends up being much easier on you. Also I've done it both ways and find no advantage to adding a partition for /boot. It just feels more complicated in general. If you are using Mut's guide here all you need to change (Means follow the guide with these exceptions)

Skip creating a boot partition and the formatting.
Skip "mkdir /mnt/backtrack/boot"
Skip "mount /dev/hdaX/ /mnt/backtrack/boot

When you edit lilo make sure you point BackTrack to load off the partition you installed BT.

When you finish all that, you have a working BT and and extra space for a primary partition if you wish.

[iank_]

Thank you both for your input.

[wick86]

Here's a suggestion. Don't worry about a boot partition. Just install backtrack without it and have /boot on the same partition as Backtrack. It's easier and for future works it ends up being much easier on you. Also I've done it both ways and find no advantage to adding a partition for /boot. It just feels more complicated in general. If you are using Mut's guide here all you need to change (Means follow the guide with these exceptions)

Skip creating a boot partition and the formatting.
Skip "mkdir /mnt/backtrack/boot"
Skip "mount /dev/hdaX/ /mnt/backtrack/boot

When you edit lilo make sure you point BackTrack to load off the partition you installed BT.

When you finish all that, you have a working BT and and extra space for a primary partition if you wish.

The main advantage to a separate /boot partition is for disaster recovery if you get a corrupted /boot partition you can just replace it and your back up and running. Now if its on the same partition as your backtrack install and it gets corrupted you will have to do a reinstall.

[Dark Ragnarok]

Pureh@te informed me that it also loads faster. Although I didn't feel any load differences, I very much stand corrected. Thank you though. I should have figured there is some purpose to it. But granted that you could use a live CD to fix the boot partition you wouldn't need to worry right? Well, that's assuming nothing corrupted the partition... : /. But looking back on all the advantages they remind me of the same reasons to partition Windows to have partitions for the OS, Program Files, and "My Documents", and whatever else to safeguard file damage and create backup.

I guess it's preference, I get along fine without it, but I'm not well versed in linux. I just speak on behalf of experiences.