Partitioning for new distro install

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Sep 17 17:56:22 UTC 2004


On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 12:33:29PM -0400, bassix wrote:
> I'm planning on installing Arch Linux (anyone here use this?) on a win
> xp machine for dual-booting. Reading the manual for Arch installation
> http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arch-install-guide.html
> , mentions separate root and boot partitions (for the automatic setup)
> http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arch-install-guide.html#commoninst31
> , but says all that is needed is a swap and root partition
> http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arch-install-guide.html#commoninst32
> , and would this pose any problems? I'm just trying to decrease the
> number of partitions on my physical drive (ntfs, fat32, swap, ext3).
> 
> Thanks for any pointers!

Unless your bios is ancient or broken, you should have no need for a
/boot partition.  It mainly serves to work around bios limitations by
being near the begining of the disk.

A primary NTFS C: 
logical FAT32 for sharing files
logical swap
primary ext3 (containing / and /boot and all the rest) should work fine.
Bootloader can go either in MBR or on the linux partition.  On the linux
partition means windows installs/upgrades/reinstalls won't trash it,
they will just change the active partition to C: which you can then
swithc back to the ext3 partition.

Lots of other ways you can do it too of course.

Lennart Sorensen
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