Hello all,

I am currently dual booting Red Hat Linux 8.0 (which is installed on my second hard drive) with Windows XP (in a manner similar to the one described on geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO, except I use LILO), and I'm planning on installing FC3 soon. I was wondering what, if any steps I need to take before I install FC3, besides recreating the boot.ini file, e.g. do I need to format the second drive before I install FC3, or will the installer do that automatically?

Also, I would like to keep my files that I have created and stored on Red Hat 8.0. I've heard that there is some way to have these files transferred automatically, but I am not sure if the installer for FC3 will handle this, or some other program will, so any help in clearing this, or the above issue up would be much appreciated.

Dapthar:

A1: The installer contains Disk Druid, which you can use to create whatever partitions you need (manual mode). You can also run the FC3 rescue mode and use parted to do it beforehand, if you want.

A2: If you have a /home partition with user files and do not reformat it, you can select it in manual disk druid as the new FC3 /home partition. You will need to sort out ownership issues after completing the FC3 installation.

If you have space in the XP partition and can mount it in RHL8, it would probably be easy to tar and gzip whatever files you want to keep and move the tarball(s) to the XP partition until FC3 is installed. This will be trivial if you are using an FAT32 partition in XP, but a little harder if it uses an NTFS partition. FC3 does not natively support NTFS, but it is not that hard to configure (i.e., custom kernel). Be forewarned that there are upper size limits on XP files. I don’t remember the maximum size, but I think it is in the low GB range, maybe around 1-2GB.

Since you are using the NT loader, I do not think you will need to create a new 'boot.ini' or linux.bin file. Whenever I reinstall using this method, the old entry will still boot the new linux distribution. The only thing I usually do is RENAME the entry in boot.ini.

Also remember to backup '/etc'. This has basically every important setting you currently use in RH.