Hi,
I'm about to install Fedora 8 on an Asus V1S that has Windows Vista Business pre-installed. This is the first time I'm installing Linux, so please excuse if some of my questions are sort of basic... :-) I've searched the forum and read the relevant posts, but I'm still not quite sure what the best option for me would be. So, any help from you would be greatly appreciated.
I would like to have a very large partition on my drive which I can read and write to from both OS's. These appear to be the options:
- create a large data fat partition which both OS's can read/write to
- create a large data NTFS partition and use ntfs-3g to allow Linux to write to it
- create a large ext3 partition and use EXT2 IFS (or similar) to allow Vista to write to it
I will use my notebook at work and whatever option I choose, it needs to be a reliable way to store my data! :-)
Furthermore, I have a number of other things which I'm not completely clear about:
- does my /home partition have to be ext3 or can it also be vfat?
- if it needs to be ext3, how small can it be considering that I would like to store my data on a partition common to both OS's?
- would it be OK if Vista is 32-bit and Fedora is 64-bit?
In the end, my drive should look something like this:
- primary partition: sda1, NTFS, Vista, ~28 GB
- extended partition: sda2
- sda5, ext3, /boot, ~200 MB
- sda6, ext3, /, ~20 GB
- sda7, -, /swap, 5 GB (eventually, I guess I will be installing 4 GB of RAM)
- sda8, fat, /home, Rest of the 160 GB (if this is possible)
alternatively:
- sda8, ext3, /home, ? MB
- sda9, fat, /data, Rest of the 160 GB
(provided that fat would be the best option for storing data, see options above)
Again, thanks a lot for your help!