Installing WinXP or Linux first.. and bootloader questions

[MDesigner]

I have a couple questions about installing Linux in general.

OK, current scenario.. I've got an 80GB drive w/ WinXP on it. I plan to install MEPIS or possibly Fedora Core 2 soon.. I'll use QTPartEd or Disk Druid (respectively) to shrink the WinXP NTFS partition down and create new Linux partitions.

Now, the questions...

1) Does Linux always use at least two partitions, one for /home and one for /? Can I somehow force it to use just one partition only?

2) I have to reformat Windows about once every 6 months or so to keep it running smoothly (piece o' crap). That means that I'll be installing Windows a lot more often than I will Linux. When I wipe the Windows partition and reinstall XP, what will happen to the Grub/Lilo bootloader? I assume XP's ntldr will take over. How do I get Grub/Lilo back again? Come to think of it, how will I even boot into Linux once XP is freshly installed?

As usual, thanks a ton for any help!

[j79zlr]

1) You should actually use more partitions, and yes you usually need atleast two partitions, one for / and one for swap space.

2) Use the NT bootloader to load linux, this is the easiest way to dual boot IMHO and would have no troubles reinstalling windows this way. Search the forum, it has been discussed many times.

3) you are supposed to post one question per thread.

[psi42]

Originally posted by MDesigner
I have a couple questions about installing Linux in general.

OK, current scenario.. I've got an 80GB drive w/ WinXP on it. I plan to install MEPIS or possibly Fedora Core 2 soon.. I'll use QTPartEd or Disk Druid (respectively) to shrink the WinXP NTFS partition down and create new Linux partitions.

Now, the questions...

1) Does Linux always use at least two partitions, one for /home and one for /? Can I somehow force it to use just one partition only?


Yes. You can use as many or as few partitions as you want. The extra partitions are simply mounted into directories. For example, your / partition will have a /home directory. If you have a /home partition, it will be mounted there, so the /home directory is really the root directory of your /home partition. If you don't have a /home partition, then the files will be just saved onto your / partition. I hope that's intelligible :D


2) I have to reformat Windows about once every 6 months or so to keep it running smoothly (piece o' crap). That means that I'll be installing Windows a lot more often than I will Linux. When I wipe the Windows partition and reinstall XP, what will happen to the Grub/Lilo bootloader? I assume XP's ntldr will take over. How do I get Grub/Lilo back again? Come to think of it, how will I even boot into Linux once XP is freshly installed?


Yes, XP will overwrite Lilo/GRUB. You'll need to use a GRUB disk (you can get an image from the grub website), or a distro bootdisk (you should get a chance to make one during the install) to boot into linux, and from there reinstall the bootloader. It's a relatively painless process, as long as you have a bootdisk on hand.

~psi42

[hard candy]

If you use Mepis, you'll have a live cd you can use to restore the bootloader after WinXP is reinstalled. For that reason, always install WinXP first. Linux can use just one partition. And with a live cd, you don't even need a partition. There's a multimedia distro called Dynabolic that you can use to just create a "cache" on the hard drive to store files and the live CD can be set up to use that every time you boot it.
But you can have as little as one partition or really as many as you can fit on one hard drive with a linux installation (I can see it now- a fstab file with 250 partitions listed. :) )
Mepis, Knoppix, Slax, Morphix, Dynabolic, etc are all availble as live distros.
These are some good sites to bookmark:
Linux Newbie Administrator Guide (http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/)
Table of Windows to linux Equivalents (http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/table.shtml#42)
And check out the Help file Library further down the main page.

[dysharmonic]

2) I have to reformat Windows about once every 6 months or so to keep it running smoothly (piece o' crap). That means that I'll be installing Windows a lot more often than I will Linux. When I wipe the Windows partition and reinstall XP, what will happen to the Grub/Lilo bootloader? I assume XP's ntldr will take over. How do I get Grub/Lilo back again? Come to think of it, how will I even boot into Linux once XP is freshly installed?


There's probably a way to get over w/ the problem of having to reformat XP twice a year. Use a backup software, like Norton Ghost.

Do a clean install of the OS and all the software you're gonna need and use most. Defrag. And then ghost it. The XP partition you're gonna ghost, shouldn't have your personal data/files on them. They're better off on another partition ;) This way when you feel that your XP is becoming sluggish, just dump your ghost images.

I could also suggest that you create a separate /boot partition. So that you wont have to lose GRUB/LILO over NT loader, when NT loader rewrites the MBR.