Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
Help me, new at this!
Dressler:
Thanks for all the replies, guys. Much appreciated!
Tux: Are you absoltuely confident that the boot loader (i'll use LILO) will automatically (and i stress automatically) set options for BOTH OS'es?
As for the autorun CD thing...it reads winXP cd rom automatically and also did with an old purchased mandrake (barely used) and the RH 7.2....
I don't know how to make the PC see the CD I made.
I used NERO and burned it as an image file with the settings I found in the readme...what else?
Dressler:
Wohhooo I found out what was wrong.
I got an error message a few days ago that the standard CMOS settings had been loaded...silly me ignoring it Anyhow, it boots off the CD.
Now is the part I fear...
My Hard drive is split into 4 partitions...a windows, and the rest Linux (Swap and I don't know what else)
I am at the partitioning thing...what do I do? I can in NO WAY risk deleting Windows, it simply must not happen. Too many important docs and *Cough*Music there.
How do I delete those three RH partitions, Put LiLo there so I can have a choice of OS when booting and install Mandrake on the last 3 partitions? I assume that I simply delete those 3 paritions and do something whatever...anyhow, THANK YOU for your time.
Open-Source community....a gift from the Lord.
Copperhead:
Use XPee's disk-partitioning manager, or disk manager, or whatever the moniker they came up with on this "new and improved" system, to delete your former partitions that you had Red Hat on. Keep your Window$ drive intact, make sure you don't delete it.
If you get error messages from Window$ stating that "cannot acces drive d:\ because it is in use" (this happened to me when I di this on my neighbor's XPee machine) go get a copy of Partition Magic from somewhere on the net. That Disk Manager is a piece of shit on XPee, so you might have to go with an eval copy of partition magic. http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/
Delete the Red Hat drives, including the swap space, and save them as UNPARTITIONED SPACE. Do not format them for a file system, do not do anything. Leave them as UNPARTITIONED SPACE.
Reboot XPee. After an hour or so, XPee will have finally booted. Open Window$ Explorer and make sure that the only drive visible to explorer is the C: drive, or whereever you have Window$ installed. If you have one window$ partition, it should be Drive C: and that is the only thing explorer should be showing. If that is the case great, you can move on. If not, you messed something up. Repeat above steps until you have the results described in this paragraph. You cannot install Linux to a drive visible to XPee. If you do, XPee will choke when it is booting because it is looking for the only three filesystems it can recognize on that partition (Fat, Fat32, and NTF$.) IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU HAVE UNPARTIONED SPACE.
If everything checks out, you are good to go. Put that Mandrake CD into the tray, reboot, and follow the instructions on your screen. When you get to DiskDrake, /dev/hda1 will be your Window$ drive (if your main Window$ drive is C:\), so do not overwrite that drive. Either use the auto-partitioner, or create new partitions (including swap space) with DiskDrake. If you are creating new partitions, make them in the unpartitioned space. Install either GRUB or LILO in /dev/hda1 when it asks you where to install the Linux Loader. (your bootsector is located in /dev/hda1 aka C:\ drive)
There are plenty of other ways to do this, but this is the easiest.
And welcome to Linux
Calum:
i would advise against using any partitioner which runs under windows or DOS.
the partitioner (diskdrake) which comes with mandrake is at least as easy to use as partitionmagic and is much more stable. I suggest loading the mandrake installer from the CD, use the graphical partitioner to delete everything EXCEPT the windows partition. This will be an easy one to spot as the partitions are colour coded. the windows one will be either a FAT32 or an NTFS partition and will be a different colour from the linux ones (i think windows ones are blue and linux ones are red, but don't quote me on that).
Now you want to make one partition for your linux "/" partition and i would suggest making one "/home" partition and one swap partition too. the / partition should be no less than 2.5 GB and no larger than maybe 7 or 8 GB in my opinion, and the /home partition should take up the rest of the drive except for about 500MB at the end, which will become the swap partition.
so now you have something like the following:
Windows | Linux / | Linux /home | Linux swap
That's just my advice, copperhead appears to know more than i do in general, but you know i like to put my two pence in.
Faust:
NTFS is dark grey, FAT is blue.
DO NOT DELETE EITHER ONE OF THOSE COLORS
Now when you click on a partition in disk drake you see a little info box that describes the partition so it's not too hard.
And remember - Diskdrake doesnt save any changes until you click the "format" or "next" buttons, so if you think you've made a mistake or if your unsure you can just hit the reboot switch on your case and try again / seek more help.
edit:wont he need a /boot?
[ May 15, 2003: Message edited by: Faust ]
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