Win Xp Status?

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Everyone does partitioning differently.

 

When SATA first came into vogue, I was smacked down a few times because of the partition limit to SATA drives (15). I learned very quickly to put /swap and /common (vfat) partitions at the beginning of the drive, then I would calculate my space/partitions for the operating systems. So, back when I had numerous tester slots on my drive, I would partition thusly:

 

primary partition - common (vfat)

extended - Linux swap

primary partition - OS

extended - OS

extended - OS

extended - OS

 

et cetera...

 

Remember, though... MS Windows likes to be on the 1st partition of the 1st drive. You can fool it with GRUB, though, if you need to.

 

Anyway, your set up will work just fine, David. There isn't really any set laws that determine how you set up your partitions/operating systems on your drives. If it works, then it's probably OK.

Edited August 23, 2014 by V.T. Eric Layton

[Cluttermagnet]

I'm trying to make full sense of what you wrote, Eric. Just not enough info to know why you learned to put storage at the beginning of the drive. I think I had it drummed into me (starting 2007) to install Windows first and install it at the beginning of the drive, then Linux later on the drive. Also, I have not been working with many SATA drives so far. I have this mental roadblock, probably not true, that there can be only 4 partitions on a given drive. Thus, my tendency to set up at least one extended partition and stuff some Linux partitions in there. My other guiding philosophy was to co-locate root with /swap- but I think I never do anything to even invoke /swap normally. I do really light duty stuff like emailing and surfing the net, mostly. Probably don't even need a swap partition. Every time I check, /swap is not being used. Almost always. But anyway I usually put Windows first, then an extended partition so root is at least somewhat close to /swap. Then 'archives' (storage) at the end. I am very much open to learning new ways of partitioning. Anyway, remember this one is a plain vanilla IDE drive...

[Cluttermagnet]

I generally allow a minimum of 4 GB for XP, but that is the bare minimum. If you are not going to load up on 3rd party software, 25 GB is generous for XP.

Make your shared data partition bigger with that extra space. 80 GB for your Linux partitions is a lot.

 

That is an amazingly small amount of drive for XP. So OK, I'm definitely thinking "smaller' after hearing what you had to say...

Maybe a lot more for /home, then. I always set up a /home so my data survives the occasional swapping of Linux OS's.

 

I often leave a bunch of Linux distro images cluttering my /home, sometimes forgetting them for years...

Edited August 24, 2014 by Cluttermagnet

[amenditman]

4 partitions is the limit with MBR partitioning, so definitely worth using an extended partition. Root and swap do not need to be close together.

 

Always best to install Windows first if you are going to share a HDD with another OS.

 

I usually install all my Linux OS to one HDD and then install Windows to it's own HDD. Any extra space on the second, Windows, HDD I use as a shared storage drive. Then I don't need a bootloader to dual boot, just use the BIOS boot menu.

 

Syslinux is a great bootloader for your Linux and Windows OSes. I use it regularly when the Windows bootloader becomes corrupted on clients machines. They never even know the difference.

Edited August 24, 2014 by amenditman

[onederer]

I do like amenditman, two separate hard drives to load and run two separate OS's. The Grub boot manager is on the external USB Linux OS hard drive. You get a Grub menu, as to which OS you want to boot. If you pull out the external hard drive, the internal hard drive with Windows in it, will boot up normally. Both OS's have plenty of space on their own drive to do their own thing. This way, neither OS is being short changed with loss of valuable space because of both having to share the same single hard drive.

 

Cheers!

[V.T. Eric Layton]

At that time, David, I was under the impression (later corrected thanks to Frank Golden's research in that thread I linked to above) I could only have 15 partitions on a SATA drive. I was known to have 30+ partitions previously on my EIDE drives. I had always put my common partition and my /swap partition last on those drives. When I tried to do that with SATA, I found that my OSes couldn't "see" those partitions anymore if they happened to beyond the 15 partition event horizon, so to speak. At that point, I started putting them at the beginning of the drive.

 

However, I don't believe any of that is necessary any more these days because the old libata limitation no longer exists.

 

There you go... clear as chocolate pudding, eh?

 

Some good reading on the always excellent Arch Linux wiki about disk partitioning --> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/partitioning

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Oh, and my current set up for those of you who may be curious...

 

/sda1 = Slackware /(root) - 50G, ext4

/sda2 = Slackware /home - 90G, ext4

/sda3 = /swap - 3G, linux swap

 

/sdb1 = Slackware /(root) sync'd partition - 50G, ext4

/sdb2 = Slackware /home sync'd partition - 90G, ext4

 

/sdc 1 = Win 7 - 120G, ntfs

/sdc2 = common storage - 200G, fat32

[Cluttermagnet]

A useful link, Eric. I learned that gparted has been automatically creating aligned partitions for me all along.

I think it might have been Bruno or maybe striker who originally recommended gparted to me- or perhaps

Urmas? Anyway, a graphical utility works for me, and gparted is pretty intuitive.

 

Also learned that sticking with the old and deprecated MBR may be best for my machines:

To dual-boot with Windows (both 32-bit and 64-bit) using Legacy BIOS, one must use MBR

Just from force of habit, I always tell gparted to make it MBR when I'm formatting a new (or new to me) HD.

I doubt I have any towers that have UEFI. Most or all of mine are probably BIOS. It's old stuff here...

Edited August 24, 2014 by Cluttermagnet

[Guest LilBambi]

If you plan on installing games, and other programs, I would go with your first impression Clutter. I would never give less than 40GB to Windows XP. I have boxed myself in a corner with Windows XP before than I have to start installing programs in the common partition. That really sucks because some programs REQUIRE being installed on c:

[raymac46]

Clutter-

You really don't have to worry about UEFI unless you have a very recent machine with some flavor of Windows 8 installed.

If you have a very modern box with a motherboard that supports UEFI it'll probably support the legacy BIOS and MBR disks as well. My newest machine which runs Linux Mint 17 only has both GPT formatted and MBR formatted disks in it. The disk with the O/S installed with the Linux Mint defaults was formatted with MBR and the disk that contains a lot of user data is GPT. It all works.

[Cluttermagnet]

Wow- a great variety of useful advice and experience. Thanks, guys! I'm leaning towards Fran's approach-

40G for XP. Perhaps 40/60/60 would be a good split (XP/Linux-extended/FAT32). Meanwhile, I did a

little reconnaissance, thinking to maybe download and run the Western Digital tool for a WD Blue type

drive (WDC WD1600AAJB-0). But all the WD stuff needed Windows to at least burn an image, etc- or it

ran outright (launched) from inside Windows. So I did a little research and came up with some geeky Linux

ways to play with the drive (lightly used off of Ebay) and assess its condition. Results seem to say both

drives in this Dell tower are relatively young and healthy.

 

I think I'll put a thread over in the Linux forum about what I used in assessing HDD health. Maybe in a

new thread, maybe I'll also add the data to the very lengthy "Clutter Learns Linux" thread- if I can still

find it.

 

Meanwhile, I think I'm ready to partition that 160G IDE drive and put XP on it. I would then immediately

put a Linux distro on the drive. The intention here is to make sure that grub takes over and that the

default at boot time is always the Linux distro. That way it won't just wander its way into booting XP

while I'm maybe not paying attention- with the Ethernet cable still hooked up!

 

At the time I install that Linux OS, I'm going to let it see the second drive, an 80G SATA type, which

is being used at this moment- Mint 17 Mate is on it. (The 80G drive will be disconnected during the

install of XP) I'm hoping that grub can indeed 'sort it all out' and I will end up with XP and Linux on

the IDE drive, plus a second Linux flavor on the 80G drive, namely Mint 17 which I'm working from

right now.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

I use fdisk and parted from the command line these days because I'm a Slackware masochist at heart, but gparted has always been (and will remain) a fav GUI tool of mine.

[Cluttermagnet]

I was reminded during my searches about checking hard drive health that Parted Magic contains such a test utility in it.

I'm booted into Parted Magic right now and can report that the hard drive test was easy to run and gives a pretty exhaustive

report, considering that the test is pretty basic, not a full surface scan. The verdict is that my 160G IDE drive is healthy.

I then fired up gparted and partitioned using a basic 40/40/80G scheme. That middle extended partition contains 14.7G

for root, a 1G swap, and 24.22G for /home. That ought to do it...

[Guest LilBambi]

You only have 512MB RAM? I thought the rule of thumb on swap was twice actual RAM?

[Cluttermagnet]

It is- but I have 8GB of RAM. Two things- I have noticed over the years that my swap files are only rarely being used. Seems like they were never touched. Then I ran across a discussion on the net recently that affirmed the rule for light RAM like 512M or 1G, but it said that beyond 2-4G, one could actually skip making a swap file in the first place. Definitely beyond 4G. I have so many towers with 2-3G Linux swap partitions that are going wasted. I'm going to search for the link and post it here. I found it interesting, also plausible, what that guy was saying. But yes, the 2x rule definitely still applies in systems with smaller RAM. Up to now I have always made a swap file. Oh BTW I remember reading elsewhere that somewhere between 1-2G of RAM you can fall back to 1x swap. I'd be going with more swap on this machine if I were going to be doing really graphics intensive stuff like video editing, but my machines generally see only light duty- emailing and web surfing.

 

 

Looking with gparted and System Monitor, I see that I set aside (wasted) nearly 4G of swap on the 80G SATA drive I'm on right now. System Monitor reports ~773M used out of 7.7G RAM. Firefox has a lot of open tabs right now- dozens- typical for me. Swap is using 0 bytes out of 3.9G. That's quite typical, in my experience. I'd say that the times I have seen any swap used at all are rare. Probably only on low RAM boxes under 2G RAM.

Edited August 25, 2014 by Cluttermagnet

[Capt.Crow]

with Windows pushed over and Linux Installed on the remainder of this drive . Linux always boots up first . Automatically . It's the first on the list .

ie:- Linux then Recovery then Windows .

[V.T. Eric Layton]

You only have 512MB RAM? I thought the rule of thumb on swap was twice actual RAM?

 

True up to a point. On modern systems, with large RAM resources (2G+), you probably don't even need a swap partition. On systems with 2G or more of RAM, you would probably be fine with a 2G swap. It would probably never be accessed by the OS, anyway.

[Guest LilBambi]

Yep, had no idea he had 8GB LOL! Or I wouldn't have even asked.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Wish I had 8GB RAM. Although, I don't know why? It's another one of those "bigger is better" things, I guess. I have 4G and rarely ever use 50% of that; even in Windows when playing games.

[Cluttermagnet]

Well, truth be told, it'll probably settle in at 4G, long term, and the other half of it will migrate over to my Dell XPS-600, which didn't come with much RAM to begin with. Oh, BTW my replacement capacitors came in just today from China. Now I can find out if that mobo is easily repairable or not...

[raymac46]

I think the concept of "wasting" HD space on swap only has relevance with newer machines if you are using an SSD with 128GB or less. I use a 120GB SSD for booting up my Linux desktop, and I put the swap partition (4 GB) on a 996 GB secondary hard drive. Of course I don't use it since this machine has 16 GB (overkill but memory was so cheap at Newegg I couldn't resist.)

Even my oldest machines have 160 GB to play with so 4 GB of swap isn't such a big deal. Well I have one netbook that only has 1 GB of RAM and a 40GB HDD but it really needs some swap space. I gave it 2 GB.

Right now I'm in Windows 7 and it's got the hammer down with 3.2 GB of RAM (and that doesn't include graphics RAM.) Linux is feather light in comparison.

[amenditman]

In most modern systems, with 2GB or more RAM, the biggest issues for the size of Swap are:

1 - Do you use Sleep or Hibernate feature? If so, you need at least 1X your RAM in Swap for Hibernate. You need to overprovision RAM to use Sleep.

2 - Do you do intensive calculations which store huge amounts of data in Ram? Like rendering audio/video to DVD type files.

[Cluttermagnet]

Hmmm- the answer is no to both those situations. And I don't ever use sleep or hibernate. I'm terrible about leaving things running. I had heard that graphics intensive stuff like video editing might tax RAM, not much else. I am not doing SETI at home or anything of that ilk that taxes my processor much. So it sounds like I'm a low swap utilization type for sure. Maybe a little on some few systems that only have 1 to 1.5GB of RAM...

[Cluttermagnet]

I think the concept of "wasting" HD space on swap only has relevance with newer machines if you are using an SSD with 128GB or less. I use a 120GB SSD for booting up my Linux desktop, and I put the swap partition (4 GB) on a 996 GB secondary hard drive. Of course I don't use it since this machine has 16 GB (overkill but memory was so cheap at Newegg I couldn't resist.)

Even my oldest machines have 160 GB to play with so 4 GB of swap isn't such a big deal. Well I have one netbook that only has 1 GB of RAM and a 40GB HDD but it really needs some swap space. I gave it 2 GB.

Right now I'm in Windows 7 and it's got the hammer down with 3.2 GB of RAM (and that doesn't include graphics RAM.) Linux is feather light in comparison.

 

It's amazing how vintage a lot of my stuff is. I have repurposed old hard drives in the 40GB and under class, fairly often. So on some drives, this is actually an issue for me. For the two towers I happen to be looking at right now, one is 40G and the other is 160G. I just recently worked with another tower of mine that had a 4G and a 30G in it. It actually is important on a few of my towers.

[raymac46]

I managed to acquire a bunch of IDE drives in the 120-160 GB range so if I get something vintage-y I swap out the 40GB drive for one of the larger ones. Most of my newer stuff is SATA so these drives are just sitting in my parts box. Even my old 2005 Dell Optiplex has a SATA HDD (although the optical drive is still IDE.)