Have a new 4TB disk which i need to partition prior to installing slack 15.

I want to have Win7 on the first partition, linux swap on the second, and slackware on the third partition.

I read that i can't use fdisk to create the partions because fdisk doesnt support partion size > 2TB, so I need to use gdisk instead. However windows 7 doesnt support GPT partions created by gdisk.

So, what would be best option to create the partition scheme that lets me dual boot windows 7 and slackware on a 4TB disk?

My current system is partitioned like this:
sda 1TB
sda1 200GB win7 boot partition
sda2 linux swap
sda3 linux slackware uses remaining disk space

well if you have uefi system you can have small vfat partition first, to be efi partition, which can boot both windows7 as well as slackware. 500MB is more than sufficient.

then a 1TB partition for your windows7.

then a 1TB partition for everything in slackware except home

then a 1.95TB partition for slackware's /home folder, for all your user data. (subtracted the 500MB for the first).

If you need swap, you can create a swap file with dd, format it with mkswap, and add it to fstab to be mounted like a swap partition.

Thanks for responding.

Looks like my system does support UEFI, but I never had to use it before. Looks like i will in order to use the 4TB disk.

So... if I understand what I've been reading, basically I'll need to:
1) create my GPT partitions
2) enable UEFI in BIOS
3) install win7 and slackware to their respective partitions, and
4) figure out how to configure GRUB or elilo or some other boot manager to boot the efi loaders in the efi system partition.

Am I on the right track?

I would like to propose a different way of solving the UEFI problem. I bought a second hand computer last summer which has Windows 10 on it. I haven't used Windows in 20 years but I thought I would keep it in the off chance that I might have a use for it some day. Using Windows utilities I drastically downsized the two Windows partitions. I installed a SSD drive as a second drive and installed Debian 11 partitions across most of the hard drive and all of the SSD drive. Then I repeatedly tried to install GRUB so that it recognized both Debian and Windows. I couldn't get that to work. I arrived at the situation that if UEFI is enabled in the BIOS the machine will boot into Windows but does not recognize the existence of Debian. If UEFI is disabled in the BIOS then the machine will boot into Debian but does not recognize the existence of Windows. That is fine with me and I run the machine with UEFI disabled.

gparted shows the existence of the two Windows partitions on the hard drive and gives names of the correct file systems on those drives. When I open konsole and mount the Windows partitions the fat32 partition mounts correctly. When I mount the Windows ntfs partition the mount command tells me that Windows is hibernating and mount will only mount the ntfs partition as read only. Interesting.

My understanding is that UEFI needs to be enabled if you want to boot from a disk that has GPT partitions, which I need in order to use all the space on the 4TB disk.
But I may end up trying something like you did. Either install windows on a smaller disk or just in a VM on my Slackware. I hardly use windows anymore, it may not even be worth trying to dual boot.

This all depends on how the system firmware/bios in implemented.
I'm able to boot the same linux install in either uefi or legacy on this system.
Windows will only install in uefi mode on gpt, whereas linux can be install either/or.

When booting gpt disk in legacy mode if you use grub as the bootloader will need a 2mb empty partition flagged bios-grub. This partition isn't needed with lilo.

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I'll frankly admit Windows95 was the last version of Windows I ever used, so I looked it up, and from this link:

Reading through the thread, I'm not sure if it mentioned whether or not your achitecutre is 64bit... but if it is, and your motherboard supports uefi, I would enable it in the bios settings, use gpt, and then I think you are totally on the right track with post #3..

With elilo, slackware should populate the efi parition, mounted at /boot/efi with EFI/SLACKWARE, and in that folder will be the efi firmware, elilo.conf, the kernel, and the initrd. To have it boot Windows, create another directory on the efi partition, /EFI/WINDOWS, and put the windows efi boot stuff, whatever that may be, in there--I suspect, that's where Windows 7 would put it. And as a fail safe, you can create a /EFI/BOOT directory, also containing your windows stuff, or which ever one you want to boot--I have to create this directory to get slackware64 to boot on 64bit apple intel computers.

there is a powerful tool that root can use to manage efi boot menu, but as with all powerful tools, you can hurt yourself if used incorrectly: efibootmgr.

.

Once setup this way, when you press whichever key your bios uses to bring up the boot menu, all efi boot entries will be options to start up from.

I installed slackware 15 on the GPT partitioned disk and skipped windows for now.

I installed elilo when prompted, skipped the lilo install. After the install finished i tried booting and it hung. I got two messages from elilo (i think it was elilo):
loading kernel vmlinuz.... done
loading file initrd.gz.... done

then it hung, no error msgs, had to reset the computer to reboot.

If i rebooted to my slackware usb installer I got what looked like a grub menu with a bunch of kernel choices. I could boot into my installed slackware 15 using both the generic and huge kernels.

After booting from the grub menu, the efi partition was mounted on /boot/efi.

/boot/efi/EFI/SLACKWARE/ contained:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 160 Feb 8 12:04 elilo.conf*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 238531 Jun 12 2018 elilo.efi*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9845790 Feb 8 12:03 initrd.gz*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7495840 Feb 2 08:06 vmlinuz*

elilo.conf:
chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1
#
image=vmlinuz
label=vmlinuz
initrd=initrd.gz
read-only
append="root=/dev/sda3 vga=normal ro"

I tried copying the huge kernel to /boot/efi/EFI/SLACKWARE/ and changing elilo.conf image line to point to that kernel, and commented out the intrd line, but it still hung trying to load the kernel.

Any ideas what could be wrong? How can I troubleshoot this?

change vga=normal to video=1024x768 or something similar in elilo.conf

Thanks, but that didn't help.

I'm not sure I'm actually seeing the elilo chooser. What I see when it hangs is:

then it hangs.

Shouldn't I be seeing some kind of boot prompt or a menu?

After I did the install I noticed that there was a new option called "Slackware" in my UEFI setup in my BIOS. So I'm guessing that the installer probably ran efibootmgr to modify the firmware. I'll play around with efibootmgr, maybe I can reinstall that entry in the firmware.

I got grub to boot into slack15 on my system. I'll figure out what to do about Win7 later.
Right now my cpu fan died, so I cant do much til I replace the fan.

Thanks to everyone that responded.
This is solved.

When you're using dualboot with Windows, note that EACH TIME you use windows you have to REBOOT for shutdown windows properly and get the full access hardware and windows partitions

I know it's stupid but it is. When you're using shutdown in fact you're just "sleeping" win's OS

After that, everything will be OK for use GNU/Linux OS

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