How To: Partition your Hard Drive.

Greetings:

With a dawn of a new release on our hands, perhaps some passing of education / knowledge to someone whom may want to have a Install of Bea to try without all the cdrom activities.

First you start off by downloading the release, This can be found on official mirrors and it could take roughly around an hour or so to download depending on your connection to the Internet, After you download it, using your favorite burning program (NERO .. or CD Record) burn it onto a Disc, I like RW discs, because you can wipe it clean for a new release .. later down the road.

Basically at this point if you are looking to play with it, or install Bea, just put in the CD and boot your computer off the CD. I will assume you know how to do this.

Now if you are planning to install it along side windows, I will post another How To on this. I am documenting on How To install Bea, as a Full OS. Launch the installer, and follow the menu's by selecting the correct Language, Key board layout, and timezone ..

When you get to the Partition screen, this is where I would like to point out, my favorite partitioning scheme. At this screen, I urge you to try this..

At the Partition screen, Select the "Manual Partitioning"

You will see Gparted (a partition manager launch) you will see your disk, probably with one partition. If you did the smart thing you have backed up all your data. If you backed up all your data, at this point proceed.

I deleted my 1 BIG partition, and broke it into 3 separate partitions. I have used the following sizes to reflect my system settings.

HDA1 - Size = 1.4 GB -- Mount Point = LINUX-SWAP (2.5 x Ram Size)
HDA2 - Size = 4 GB -- Mount Point = / (top level) Type: RieserFS
HDA3 - Size = 30+ GB -- Mount Point = /Home Type: RieserFS
Bonus: Add a hda4 - size = 8GB == Basically this can be used to install windows ...

Now the beauty of this setup is when you want to install another Linux distro, or install ubuntu, or Linux Mint, All you are required to do is remove HDA2 and re-create the partition, and format it, to install your OS clean.

To Dual boot with Windows.. Windows MUST be installed first. Grub (Linux' boot loader) will provide an option to Boot Windows... I will document how to tweak the Boot loader in another document.

With the partition HDA3, after you accept the "manual partition" scheme you will have a choice where you want the mount point, but also if you create the same account in Linix Mint (say " user ") your home folder is left .. Untouched on the /Home (hda3) partition,

I know you are getting confused, lol, But Try it a couple of times... Follow my directions ..

Install once -- creating this Partition structure (Backup all files)
copy over 10 files that you know are your personal files (i use mp3)
then do the install again, but NOT deleting the Home Partition, and create the same user on the machine, and tweaking the "Mount Points"