Dual boot xp / yoper question

[perfectturmoil]

Hey guys.

I have a laptop (2.4ghz P4) that I plan on installing a linux distro onto. Ive always been interested, and now that I primarily use Unix at work, its about time for me to learn something :-]

I've decided to try yoper first, because it appears to perform, and the install seems easyish. Once I get confident, I'll move on to gentoo.. but baptism by fire can come later ;-]

My situation is this: the laptop has a 40gig hard drive. At the moment, it is quite filled up, but most of it is useless stuff. I was thinking I want to keep (well.. reinstall) XP pro on there, just to make certain things easier. Transfering files, letting family / friends use the laptop.. things like that. That would mean do about a 20gig / 20gig split between the two. I was also thinking that having a shared partition would be a good idea too. That way I could transfer files from places using XP, put em on the shared "drive", and open em in linux. My question is: how hard is it to do this? And what portions should I make the splits?

15 for linux / 15 for windows / 10 for files?
20 / 10 / 10?
17 / 17 / 6?

I plan to just throw in the yoper cd, and go at it.. I assume that the yoper install will be able to format over the old stuff.. correct? Will I be able to decide partitions right there with one left available for windows?

Thanks :-]

[fiji]

you can make the partitions whatever size you want but

#1 i'd install windows first (make it a 20gb or whatever size partition you settled on)
#2 then install yoper , im sure it lets you set the partition size
#3 if you can set up the third storage partition in the yoper setup, do that , and it would probably best for fat32 ("vfat" i think)
#4 if you cant setup the third at the time of install you can just do it later, after you install yoper - (with a livecd that comes with parted,fdisk,cfdisk, or whatever you like-- something like knoppix) you'll also need to make the file system after creating the partition (mkfs )


alternatively you could just make all the partitions at once, from a livecd
but theres no real advantage (going to take less/equal time, the other way)



hope this help ssome


*edit*
remember, windows first :D

[Arkaine23]

Yoper has qtparted as an option for doing partitions when you install. Its a clone of partition magic and can resize NTFS without dataloss. You should defrgament and get the files at the front of the drive from windows before using qtparted. Also, it may not be an option on the laptop if the initail video driver used by the installer can't display graphics for you. And in that case Knoppix might be a better option for resizing if you don't want to reinstall XP. Yoper's installer also has text-only partitioing tools but they can't resize existing partitions non-destructively.

So-

No XP reinstall , use qtparted in yoper's installer
or
XP reinstall and re-partition, leave blank space for yoper's installer to partition on
or
use Knoppix to do some partitioning with qtparted and no XP reinstall needed