Need help with Linux install

[BustinJustin]

I'm wanting to install Linux Mint alongside Windows 7 on my main rig.  I only have a 120gb boot ssd and it's mostly taken up with Win7 and applications. 

 

I do, however have an old 500gb hdd inside my rig and wouldn't mind installing Mint on a partition on that disk. 

 

My question is: what's the best way to do that? Should I format it from within Windows, boot from a disk with Linux and then use the installer to create a partition and install Linux on that partition?  If so, I need to know how to tell the difference between my drives in Linux. They are all named /dev/something or some such malarchy.  Anyways, this is what I'm wanting to do.  Good idea?

 

Thanks!

[zoltan]

You can simply start Mint from the liveDVD or from USB, it will run as live distro on your computer. Then you can use gparted to partition the HDD, which is much simpler and faster than partitioning in windoze, plus it willallow you to format the partition you want to install Mint on in ext4-format. Windows can't read or handle that format, but it's much more efficient in many ways than ntfs, and although linux can be installed on ntfs, it's much better to use ext4.

 

You can also do the partitioning and formatting in the installer itself, it's pretty much the same, but since you're a first time user, I guess gparted in the live distro will give you more confidence than partitioning/reformatting in the installer.

 

You can then run the installer from the live distro without restarting, and select the partition you've created to install everything.

 

Probably Mint will want to make 3 partitions, one root (\), one swap (\swap) and one home (\). Installed programs and the system come in root, documents and downloads and user files come in home, swap is what it says and will not be used much in practice, but it's still advisable to make the swap as large as the system RAM.

 

The disks are named logically in linux: de first disk would be sda, the second sdb, the third sdc, etc... you don't have to start with C: and go back to A: or something illogical, it's pretty much straightforward. Then partitions on a disk will have the name of the disk with a number, so the partitions on sda will be sda1, sda2, sda3, etc...

 

If the SSD is your primary disk, the HDD will probably be sdb. So partitions on sdb will be sdb1, sdb2 and sdb3 for instance. You can leave the part of the disk that is not used by linux (and to be honest you need only like 60-80 GB of total disk space for linux, about 20 GB for root, about 4-8 GB for swap and the rest for home) for windows, and in ntfs format. Linux will be able to read and write from and to ntfs windows partitions (and will do so even more efficiently than windows). The home, swap and root partitions are best formatted as ext4 (much more efficient and modern filesystem than ntfs), and the root partition should normally also be flagged as boot, but the installer will take care of that.

 

The installer will also install GRUB, which is a bootlader. This will be installed where you want it (it will ask you), anywhere that is accessible at bootup is possible. GRUB will present you with a screen at bootup that allows you to select which operating system you want to start, linux or windoze.

 

I hope that helps