Hey there, I'm hoping that somebody would be willing to give me some advice.
I first installed kubuntu a few weeks ago when I realized that my main hard drive was about to die. I've played with it while waiting for the drive to officially crash and burn - it's under warranty, and seagate's tool didn't want to give me a code at first. Well, I use two drives. One, a 500gb drive is the 'main' one. It was purchased when window 7 came out because the install would be a good time to swap hard drives (I wanted a clean install, not an upgrade from Vista). The original drive (250gb) has been used for storage ever since, mostly for music, ebooks, work files and other documents. Naturally, it had some free space and I partitioned it off for kubuntu in order to use my computer in the meantime and to let me make some backups without (theoretically) stressing the dying drive as much.
Well. Seatools finally coughed up a warranty validation code, and I now have the replacement hard drive. Only I'm wondering how to set things up now because I'd like to keep kubuntu installed. I like it better for pretty much everything other than certain games.
Should I keep the two operating systems on separate hard drives, or should I return the older (smaller and slower) one to it's original purpose as storage and make windows and linux share the primary drive? If I do that, what would be the best way to transfer the current installation over? I mean, I had to jump through some rather irritating hoops to get internet access and sound working, not to mention getting other things tweaked and set up as I like them. Would a partition image be best? Or should I do a fresh install of both operating systems and use a backup to restore settings and installed packages? Or is it even possible to back those things up? Also: would restoring grub work after installing windows if it isn't the same hard drive? I mean, the replacement is the same make and model... but not the same drive that was there when kubuntu was first installed alongside windows.
I'm ashamed to say that I didn't plan on keeping Kubuntu around so I gave it a pretty tiny partition (but also so I had more room for backing up the main drive without wasting a bunch of blank DVDs). I need to move it eventually, or at least resize it (or maybe move 'home' to somewhere else). And resizing runs the risk of screwing things up (which brings me back to jumping through hoops).
I was thinking.... 50GB each for windows and linux, 3GB for linux's swap partition, 100mb for grub, whatever windows wants for system reserved.. and the rest for games and misc windows software. Sound good? Or should I tweak it somehow?
I first installed kubuntu a few weeks ago when I realized that my main hard drive was about to die. I've played with it while waiting for the drive to officially crash and burn - it's under warranty, and seagate's tool didn't want to give me a code at first. Well, I use two drives. One, a 500gb drive is the 'main' one. It was purchased when window 7 came out because the install would be a good time to swap hard drives (I wanted a clean install, not an upgrade from Vista). The original drive (250gb) has been used for storage ever since, mostly for music, ebooks, work files and other documents. Naturally, it had some free space and I partitioned it off for kubuntu in order to use my computer in the meantime and to let me make some backups without (theoretically) stressing the dying drive as much.
Well. Seatools finally coughed up a warranty validation code, and I now have the replacement hard drive. Only I'm wondering how to set things up now because I'd like to keep kubuntu installed. I like it better for pretty much everything other than certain games.
Should I keep the two operating systems on separate hard drives, or should I return the older (smaller and slower) one to it's original purpose as storage and make windows and linux share the primary drive? If I do that, what would be the best way to transfer the current installation over? I mean, I had to jump through some rather irritating hoops to get internet access and sound working, not to mention getting other things tweaked and set up as I like them. Would a partition image be best? Or should I do a fresh install of both operating systems and use a backup to restore settings and installed packages? Or is it even possible to back those things up? Also: would restoring grub work after installing windows if it isn't the same hard drive? I mean, the replacement is the same make and model... but not the same drive that was there when kubuntu was first installed alongside windows.
I'm ashamed to say that I didn't plan on keeping Kubuntu around so I gave it a pretty tiny partition (but also so I had more room for backing up the main drive without wasting a bunch of blank DVDs). I need to move it eventually, or at least resize it (or maybe move 'home' to somewhere else). And resizing runs the risk of screwing things up (which brings me back to jumping through hoops).
I was thinking.... 50GB each for windows and linux, 3GB for linux's swap partition, 100mb for grub, whatever windows wants for system reserved.. and the rest for games and misc windows software. Sound good? Or should I tweak it somehow?
BTW, 10GB is way more swap than you'll ever need unless you're doing massive math or encoding 3-4 videos at once. Swap is mainly used for two things: to replace memory space in the event you fill RAM to capacity and to mirror RAM when you hibernate/suspend. On a desktop configuration, suspend/hibernate is not usually used so you need only enough to cover RAM. If you have 8GB RAM, unlikely you'll fill it. Another, but less common use for swap is to replace /tmp. If you have sufficient RAM (8GB or more) you can mount tmpfs as a combination of RAM and SWAP space - but thats's another advanced topic.
Comment