GNU/Linux Partitioning: A Myth

It’s annoying to read so much about partitioning under GNU/Linux being hard. Though I have installed various distributions (and still installing) for about 50 times in a year (without exaggeration) for myself, my friends and known people; this claim about “Partitioning under GNU/Linux is hard” is really baseless since I’ve never faced such complication till now even though I am not an extremely advanced user.

One possibility that I could think of is that a traditional windows user trying to install GNU/Linux as dual-boot might get confused when he/she sees hda, hdb, hdc instead of C:/, D:/, E:/ and so on. One thing to for an Windows user to understand here is that the way drives/devices are represented in GNU/Linux are different from that of Windows. In GNU/Linux all devices are treated as special files.

Thus, under GNU/Linux, if you have multiple partitions in single hard drive, the first partition representation of your typical first hard drive will be hda1 and continued by hda2, hda3 and so on. The second hard drive will be represented as hdb[partition number].

Most people get confused reading the Hard Drive representations under GNU/Linux partitioning when they install GNU/Linux for the first time (I did it myself the first time, but since I was a UNIX user, i knew a little about these representations). Other than this single issue which has to be understood before starting installations, I believe partitioning under GNU/Linux is as easy as compared to windows if you understand the meaning of root, swap and home spaces. In fact, you have more options and easy installation in GNU/Linux than Windows.

Most of us install GNU/Linux in a Pre-Installed Windows PC (or in a PC where Windows is already installed by someone other than OEM) which is pretty much straight forward. But have you ever tried installing Windows XP (or any other version of Windows for that matter) for dual boot in already installed GNU/Linux distribution without the help of any 3rd party tools (Like GParted, etc)?

GNU/Linux installation in a pre-installed Windows PC, lets me resize the windows partition (automatically or manually) and even copy the user-accounts before start installing without loosing a single data in Windows partition.

After the installation, the Boot Loader gives me choice of either booting into GNU/Linux or Windows with GNU/Linux (your distribution) as a default choice, waiting for 10 seconds or so, depending on your GRUB configuration. But installing Windows after GNU/Linux is a nightmare.

To prove my point, as an aspiring geek still at the beginner level, I held an experiment on my laptop which I have provided as screen shots. I have skipped the installation of GNU/Linux part to make it straight to the point. The screen shots shown here are taken right after the first boot on GNU/Linux right after the installation.

The installation was done under ‘Vmware Player’ with 25GB HDD space and 1GB RAM in a 160GB + 3GB RAM Laptop (HP DV5292 Dual Core) which solely runs Ubuntu (It was openSuSE until Ubuntu 7 arrived and n waiting for openSuSE 10.3).




The below is the login screen where you have to provide your user name and password. You can also avoid this screen by making your general user as auto login user.



Once the user name and password you'll get this screen which initializes services and peripherals before getting into the desktop.



The below is a plain, simple desktop at first boot.



Restart the GNU/Linux system (Note that the CD is already present – in faint icon).



Press 'Escape' to get into Boot Menu.



Select CD-ROM from the listed Boot devices.



Select CD-ROM Drive from the listed Boot Device Options.
Windows XP gets detected and asks to press any keep to boot form the CD to continue with Setup or Repair.



A much familiar set of screens comes copying various files.







The options are given either to start new installation of repair an installation or quit setup without doing anything. Press Enter key to start Windows XP installation.



Oops!!!



Well, seems to me that there is no chance of going ahead with windows installation at this point.



This has nothing to do with presenting driver software for Windows because when I install Windows first (another article about dual-installation in layman’s term), it installs without a hitch.

I guess no one complaints about GNU/Linux partitioning or GNU/Linux installation anymore. I intend to cover more of this during upcoming days (exclusively about dual-booting, partitioning, resolving the above faced situation, etc), till then. Yella, Bye.