preparing for install

[WiNnErPL]

Ok I just bought a new 80 gig hd so I can use my old 40 gig for linux and i'm planning to use red hat 8.0. I have partition magic so what would I go about the best way to format the HD so the installation will go without a hassle (hopefully). Thank you in advance.

[sandeep]

All the best , buddy:D

[michaelk]

You really don't have to do anything. The RH installer will repartition and format the drive as desired.

[LrngTheHardWay]

I prefer to partition and format before any OS install.

Last I checked, Partition Magic won't do ext3 partitions (ext2 only), but the install driver should volunteer to migrate your parts to ext3, so that shouldn't be a big issue.

If you do go with the automatic partitioning route, it'll give you a 100MB boot partition, twice the size of your installed system memory for a swap partition, and the rest allocated to /

I usually move the swap to a physically separate drive and give it an automatic 2GB...even though I've rarely seen swap utilization to any degree with Linux.

I also put /tmp and /var in their own partitions, and relegate /home to the second partition (swap is the first) on a physically separate (and very large) drive...but that's a personal preference thing. I hate running out of /home directory space!

All in all, it's really up to your personal preferences and resource availability.

Oh yeah.....do consider picking up a couple of drive docks as you'll probably find yourself moving over to Linux more and more to do your core tasks.