Hello all,
Can anyone tell me how to go about installing a third OS on my laptop? I've got two windows partitions, one of which I don't really need and I was thinking of using that to try some different Linux (and BSD) distributions but I have no idea how to do it.
This is the content of /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda9 /home reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6 /usr reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hda8 /usr/lib reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hda7 /var reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=437 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/E vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
/dev/hda5 through /dev/hda9 are on an extended partition /dev/hda4. /dev/hda5 (4,5 GB) is the one I want to turn into an extra OS. I'm currently running SuSE 9.2 and I don't want to cripple that (given that I've gone through 3 or 4 installations over the past two months).
When I use the partitioning tool in Yast I get the following options for /dev/hda5 :
-no formatting : file system ID :
0x83 Linux
0x0C Win 95 FAT32
0x8E Linux LVM
0xFD Linux RAID
0x82 Linux swap
0xA0 Hibernation
-formatting : file system :
Ext2
Ext3
FAT
JFS
Reiser
XFS
Swap
-mount point :
/windows/E
/boot
/opt
/srv
/tmp
/local
The main problem – as far as I can tell – is where to mount the partition: none of the shown options seems to be an obvious one so I'm hoping one of you can enlighten me. (Don't really want to experiment since I once tried to move /usr to a seperate partition and thereby f*cked up the whole system which cost me another day of installation.)
As for formatting or not, my guess is yes, since /dev/hda5 is currently 0x0c Win 95 FAT32, but which file system should I go for ? (Obviously not FAT and probably not Swap ?)
Finally, how and where do I make this partition bootable ?
Many thanks in advance for helping me out,
Guy