Dual boot Windows98 & Fedora Core 2 Installation
 

I am not sure about how I should go about partitioning my hard drive for a dual boot, windows 98 2nd ed - keep my system and fat partitioning as it is, and take out free space for linux. I have 2 hard drives, the original C 15 GB drive and a second 60 GB D drive, broken down into 3 partitions, D and E, each 8 GB, and an F drive of 40 GB. The F partition has never been used and I would like to assign all of this space to linux. All partitions have been formatted as FAT32. I have 184 MB RAM.

Can I use my Partition Magic 5 to partition up the existing windows F partition? Can I delete the F partition and then use the existing 40 GB space to create a logical partition? Should I further break down the linux logical partition first into a root partition of 10GB - I want to do a full Fedora Core 2 distribution install (from the Wiley Red Hat Fedora Linux 2 Bible - 6.3 GB needed), a swap partition of 500MB, a /boot partition of 100MB, a /usr partition of 5 GB to hold applications, a /var partiton of 5 GB to hold web files, a /home partition of 19.5 GB to hold user data.

This work station will mainly be for personal use, although I would like to get my feet wet in setting up a server- just for practice. So Partition Magic sets up a logical partition to contain the other partitions? The GRUB loader must also be installed in the C master boot record? Does the C drive need any other additions?

Any suggestions and recommendations regarding partitioning would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your reference. Much appreciated.

Can I make any existing, non Windows system primary partition accessible to linux, or do I have to create a new FAT32 partition with a linux mount point?

I then create a primary and a logical partition one underneath the other - the primary linux partition 200 MB as the / boot partition and linux logical partition to hold all remaining linux partitions - the swap partition, the / root partition, the /usr partition and any other linux partitions.The mount points are done from Partition Magic?

I am assuming setting the master boot record of the C drive to contain both windows and linux instructions as part of the linux installation procedure involves simple and straight forward steps?

Does the "problem with the hard drive Geometry" involve only XP and linux or are there also cases involving Windows 98 and linux? As a newbe this sounds absolutely terrifying.

You could use any existing FAT32 partition. I'm not quite sure what the status of NTFS write access in the kernel is right now, but last time I checked, it was labelled experimental. That said, I think knoppix has a third party patch or utility to write to NTFS partitions which is supposed to be quite stable.

No, you specify them during the install, or subsequently by editing /etc/fstab

The non-technical answer to your question is "yes".

The technical answer is that GRUB, the recommended boot manager, and default boot manager for at least RedHat and Fedora, stores the information about which system to boot from which partitions, and with which switches and parameter values, on a linux partition, namely that mounted as /boot (or the root partition if no separate boot partition is used). However, the implementation of windows and linux boots (among many others) is contained within the program that occupies the boot sector.

All versions of Windows afaik.

Back up all your data first!

Samsara