Redhat 9 - WinXP Home - New Slave HD

[thebear]

I read around the forums and it answered a lot of my questions...but before I do anything I want to be clear...

Right now I have Windows XP Home on one hard drive. What I want to do is start running Red Hat on the same machine, but use a different hard drive (one that I plan on buying in the coming days) so that I can mess around without worrying to much about knackering my current files. My question is what configuration should I use when installing the HD, and how do boot the RedHat install?

 

[lieb39]

My question is what configuration should I use when installing the HD, and how do boot the RedHat install?

First of all, when going into the install, you want to make sure that the hard drive that you are going to install Linux onto doesn't have any partitions on it - this makes configuring your system several times easier.

Anyways, you will want to partition a good 95% or so of your hard drive in the ext3 file system and mount it at /. You will also want to create a Linux Swap partition, which should be 500mb or so - this is the equivalent to your Windows page file. Lastly, to make booting fail-safe, you will want to partition a 11mb partition as "Linux Boot" and mount it at /boot. Windows will not recognize these partitions and will not mount them, but Linux can recognize your NTFS and FAT32 partitions and mount them (in the case of NTFS partitions, they will be read-only in Linux).

Booting into Red Hat Linux's install couldn't be easier. There are two ways to do it, actually - by creating a bootable floppy disk (slow), or simply booting from the first disc. In the case of booting from a floppy, read on...

You'll want to open up a command prompt under Windows and browse to wherever Disc 1 of Red Hat Linux 9 is. Type "cd dosutils". After that, type "rawrite" (no quotes). When it asks for an image file, type "..\images\boot.img" (again, no quotes). When it asks for a floppy, insert a formatted 1.44mb floppy disk into the drive and input A:. Your boot floppy will be created and you'll be able to boot into Red Hat Linux setup from there.

 

[scsa20]

just throwing this in here... if you want to share with NTFS in RedHat, RedHat doesn't come with NTFS support, so you have to go to http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html and download/complile the correct module to add NTFS support to Red Hat... after that, you can mount your NTFS partitons.

 

[viraxine]

You don't necessarily need the boot disk to boot Linux, all you have to do is boot off of the Linux CD1. If you downloaded the ISO's, then burn those onto CD's and then just boot off of CD1.

Make sure you install Linux onto the right hard drive. Linux doesn't configure hard drives like windows does (drive C:, D:, E: etc). It's more like hda, hdb, hdc, etc.

So your main drive would be hda and your second one your adding would be hdb.

If anyone knows more about Linux than I do, then feel free to correct me, since I'm kind of a newb to linux myself (although I have installed it correctly, which is the first step to becoming L33t, lol)

 

[X-Istence]

excuse me, but if you use Linux you would use the words:

l33t
k3wl
0wn3d

Now if you are really cool, and are not a Red hat fanatic you try out FreeBSD. Now when using FreeBSD its inappropriate to use the words l33t, or c00l. Basically i fit in the FreeBSD category.

You people should try it out sometime. Its more organized, nice ports tree, and its just as easy to install, if not easier.

It does all the creation of the partitions and naming them itself saving you a lot of the trouble. Install could be done within 60 minutes.

 

[thebear]

Originally posted by X-Istence
excuse me, but if you use Linux you would use the words:

l33t
k3wl
0wn3d

Now if you are really cool, and are not a Red hat fanatic you try out FreeBSD. Now when using FreeBSD its inappropriate to use the words l33t, or c00l. Basically i fit in the FreeBSD category.

You people should try it out sometime. Its more organized, nice ports tree, and its just as easy to install, if not easier.

It does all the creation of the partitions and naming them itself saving you a lot of the trouble. Install could be done within 60 minutes.

I did RedHat it 30 Auto Partitioner, auto-detects all hardware, great step by step installation UI...nothing but praise for this distro