Hello,im currently trying to decide how to best go about adding several versions of linux(and possibly BSD) to a secondary HDD.
My 1st question is how to best go about removing my current ubuntu install off my main HDD(it will be entirely for my win7 install), ive used easyBCD to remove grub and rewrite the mbr, now all i have to do is delete the ubuntu partition(45g on disk 2) but i worry that may brick my HDD.
Secondly what is the best way to split my second disk(disk1) into 3 even partitions and does each partition need its own swap partition?
So to recap disk 1 will be a multi-OS disk for testing and trying out distros and disk 2 will be my main drive devoted to windows, they will both share a external 1tb where my media is kept.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, if i left any vital info out let me know.
I would advise you to back up anything you want to keep on windows (images, music, docs etc) but not windows itself. After backup you may be able to use the windows 7 disk management to expand your windows 7 partition to use the full hard drive.
Windows partition software sometimes fails which is why you need to backup first.
Then reboot and make sure windows works, there is unused space on your windows 7 drive and you can install without the system reserved partition, but you can use google for this or ask in the windows forum on TSF.
To install linux on the first hard drive, just use the distribution CD to set up the partitions. For example, if you choose PCLinux, or Ubuntu you will come to the point where the installer asks you about partitioning. You MUST choose custom, failure to do so will most likely wipe your windows install and use all available disk space of both hard drives.
When you install the partition will show you current partitions. The one with NTFS is your windows hard drive, take note it will be called sda or sdb depending on which connector the drive is connected to. If SATA the connector SATA_0 will be sda if your hard drives are IDE then master on first IDE connector will be sda. All that matters is that you take note which is linux and which drive is windows, if you get this wrong then you could overwrite your windows partition.
Forget about FreeBSD at the moment, you are not ready for it. There is not as much software available for FreeBSD and some hardware vendors, ATI for example dont support FreeBSD. FreeBSD can only be installed in a primary partition anyway and further complicates matters.
When you choose custom partitioning, you need to create separate / , /home and /swap partitions. You need to make a note of what you use, For example sda1 /
, sda2 /home and sda3 /swap The / can be about 25G although you could get away with 15G, swap size you are ok with 1G (unless you install on a laptop then the swap partition needs to be same size as RAM for suspend to disk to work). Home partition can be any size e.g. 25G. You must write down what you have used. You will then install the boot loader, generally grub or grub2. This will be installed to either sda or sdb but unfortunately grub does not use these naming conventions. sda is grub (hd0) and sdb is (hd1) You can install grub to the MBR of either drive but you must make sure that you set the drive boot order in BIOS to match this.
Once you have installed a single linux system with windows (dual boot) you can then install another linux system. In this case choose manual partitioning, but this time only create / and /home. You can point the new linux system to use the already created /swap partition. As you can only have 4 primary partitions then when it comes to custom partitioning this time choose a logical partition and create for example / on sda5 and /home on sda6 the /swap would be sda3 or wherever you created it with your first install.
As youve installed Ubuntu before you must be familiar with some of this but a quick search on google you will find over 4 million pages to help you:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=w...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
