installing fedora 6 om hp laptop root partition (/) problem
 

i am trying to install fedora linux on my laptop which i have aprtitioned the hard drive into two but wduring the set up it recognises the drive but keep saying i have not defined a root partition (/) which is required for installation to continue.

please help.

firts time user.

cheers

You said you did partition your drive into two partitions. Did you format the new partition? Did you leave it as free space? I'm guessing you formatted the new partition, possibly with NTFS.

Generally most installers want you to leave the space as free space. When you do the install, the distro will look at the disk, find the free space, and ask if this is where the linux system is to go. In linux '/' is where the root file system goes. I would also suggest you create a swap partition, about double the installed ram is enough, and one for /home. Home is where all you user stuff goes.

You will be given an opportunity during the install to format the new / file system with one of the linux supported file systems. Swap has its own file system, and home can be formatted with any linux supported file system.

hope this helps.

When installing linux it's wise to have
1) a root partition /
2) a swap partition
3) a home partition /home

and I usually make a /boot boot partition but I have never dual booted so I don't know if this would interfere with the windows bootloader ...?

So on the partition that you want to install linux onto you need to define a root partition in order to continue with the installation.

Your root partition needs to be large enough to store your programs etc., your home partition to store all your personal files and your swap space should be about twice as big as the amount of ram that you have.

It's fairly straightforward to do this with fdisk. You define the size of each partition , then you should format them (I use ext3) and define what type of partition it is (ie. swap, root, boot etc).