Arch Linux

Veovis Muad'dib

Member

Registered: 2009-06-12

Posts: 43

Sharing a pair of hard drives between Arch, OS X, and Windows

My optical drive died on me a few months ago, so in about a week I'll be getting an optibay ripoff for my laptop, allowing me to use that space for a second hard drive.  I wanted to plan this out ahead of time, so I could have time to spot any errors and get any feedback as to what might not work, what won't work, and what would be better.

A bit of information about me, I use OS X (10.6) the most on this machine, but I'm a multiplatform guy.  OS X will need a fair bit of room for applications.  This is my only computer, so I have to play all my PC games on it.  That means that Windows 7 needs a good amount of space for programs.  Arch will have Awesome installed, with KDE if I need it, and so I have access to Konversation and Kate in Awesome.  Arch will mainly be used for development and surfing, so I won't need much room for applications at all.

I hate having redundant bootloaders, so OS X and Windows will boot from the original drive, while Arch will boot from the new drive.  This will allow me to use BCD in the MBR of my first drive, and GRUB in the MBR of my second drive.  That means I can use rEFIt as my only bootloader, which, to be honest, is my main reason for wanting two hard drives.  EDIT: Only bootloader I interact with...

In Windows, I have a licence for MacDrive.  In Arch I can read HFS+, out of the box if I recall.  I want to have a shared home partition between the three Operating Systems.  HFS+ is a Unix filesystem, so it should be safe to use as a home for Arch.  I don't have any problems reading HFS+ from Windows, so I'm willing to bet it'd be okay to have as a home directory.  IF ANYONE KNOWS DIFFERENTLY, PLEASE TELL ME NOW.  And explain the problem if you know what it is.

Chances are I'll use a different name for my account on every OS, to prevent collisions.  I probably won't need this, but I'd like to be safe.

I will probably be partitioning the drives as follows:  (Ballpark numbers...)

Original Drive:  500GB
GUID Partition Table
     Partition 1 - OS X - / - HFS+ - 100GB
     Partition 2 - Windows 7 - C: - NTFS - 375GB
     Partition 3 - Arch Linux - / - EXT4 - 25GB

New Drive: 500GB
Master Boot Record
     Partition 1 - Arch Linux - /boot - EXT2 - 250MB
     Partition 2 - ALL - /home | /Users - HFS+ - 499.75GB

I'm looking for any input, this is my only computer and I only have access to an optical drive to install OSs when I take apart my friend's laptop and put his drive in.  So I need to get it right the first time.

Last edited by Veovis Muad'dib (2010-08-26 07:09:52)

graysky

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From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

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Re: Sharing a pair of hard drives between Arch, OS X, and Windows

Seems kinda complicated.  Why not just use grub or grub2 chainloading the native bootloaders for win and osx?  Also, why use ext2 for Arch?  Use ext4.  Ext2 is fine for /boot.

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Veovis Muad'dib

Member

Registered: 2009-06-12

Posts: 43

Re: Sharing a pair of hard drives between Arch, OS X, and Windows

It is complicated, but I want one partition for my /home for Linux and /Users for OS X and Windows.

As for the bootloaders, there are a great many good things about Macs, and a great many annoyances.  One annoyance is the bootloaders and partition table.  While I could load everything from grub, a Mac's bootloader will ignore GRUB for about 45 or so seconds while it searches for an HFS+ partition to boot off of.  It will find mine, and I'd have to prevent that by holding down Option to bring up the Mac's bootloader.  Which would mean that I'm interacting with two bootloaders, which is just annoying.
Right now, I'm using rEFIt as my default bootloader, which boots OS X immediately, but brings me to GRUB when I choose Windows or Linux.  When I get two disks, rEFIt will be able to send me to BCD when I choose Windows, or GRUB when I choose Linux.  It's not the simplest to set up or explain, but it is the fastest and simplest way once I have it set up.

Another way of saying the above is that the native bootloader chains into GRUB and BCD, and I'm told having GRUB on a partition is not a very good idea.

Yeah, I'll switch over to ext4 for Arch.  I'm not too concerned with what filesystem it uses for /, that's why I just went with ext2 at first.