I'm new to the partitioning system of linux installation and usually let the partitioner do it for me but i would like to kno how to partition the disk myself to make it bootable to avoid Grub Error 18. I have done a google search and all it tells me to do is make a small 100mb /boot partition then my swap and my /. There are so many options in the partitioner i dont kno what to do. Any help would be appreciated.

This is an older system with a 40GB hard drive, a floppy drive and dvd-rw.

Detailed information on how to setup correct partitions would be great.

Thanks in advance!

We are in the same boat, I hear so far that the HDD is either too big to the BIOS is too old. Which, my HDD is a 12GiB and my computer is one month old straight from the manufacturer.

You need to choose to create partitions manually. Create the first partition as 100MB. Look for the part that allows you to set the mount point and set that to "/boot". There should be a multiple choice type of thing when you press enter on the mount point. You'll probably want to use ext3 as your filesystem type. Next, decide how much you want to use up for swap. Subtract that amount from the remaining amount on the disk, and create a partition of that size giving a mount point of "/" and ext3 filesystem type. Finally, create a partition with what's left of the disk and set that as swap. There are guidelines but no rules for the size of swap. If you have a gig of memory, don't feel compelled to use 2GB of swap unless you really do intend to run processes that require an aggregate of more than 1GB of memory space. If you're planning to use suspend to disk, you're on your own. I don't use that and I've never looked into it.

I am confident that you can look around, maybe make a few mistakes, but learn where the mount point and filesystem entries are made. Mistakes are unimportant. Just redo it until you have the three partitions you need. Then accept it and move on to the next phase of the installation.

Why/How do you make things sound so simple? I will have to try that...

Thanks for the info lol..once before i did create the /boot but i did somethin wrong and it didnt work right..

thanks, Quakeboy02. i'm a linux noob, so it took me a while to implement your solution to grub error 18. nevertheless, one i figured it out (note to other noobs: the swap partition has to be formatted to swap format, not ext3) it worked like a charm. after many other trials and tribulations, i managed to get openSUSE 10.3 installed today. i'm pretty happy about that.

I used Google to search, using the string and I found some good articles, including one at Red Hat Magazine that does a good job explaining how to interactively use GRUB to figure out how to locate, access, and create entries for vmlinuz and initrd files for many different systems. That article can be found at http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/0...boot-problems/

Just Linux has one of the best forum posts for going crazy with GRUB - using GRUB to boot OVER 100 distinct operating systems! You can find that one here: http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=147959 - saikee's version, which has acquired a bit of "fame" in the multi booting world! ;-)

If these two articles aren't enough, use Google or Yahoo to poke around a bit, then experiment. Save your work, then play around with it. You probably won't get things perfect your first time around, but you will eventually find GRUB to be one of the most, if not THE most, flexible boot loader around, and you will be able to get it to do most anything except cook for you!

Hope you have found this helpful.