having problems installing Linux
 

I have received a copy of partition magic 8.0 and installed it on my windows xp system. My drive is partitioned as follows: 1. swap file, 2. partition for windows, 3. partition for boot magic, 4. partition for Linux. when I try to install Linux from boot disk it locks up before the lnstaller fully loads and locks the system. I would appriciate any suggestions on getting Linux installed onto the partition I have created for it.

Hi Dakota

So you want to dual boot WinXP and a Linux distribution on the same hard drive?

A few things to keep in mind :

• Install WinXP FIRST and then Linux Second
  
• Make sure you leave some FREE SPACE on the end of your drive after youve installed XP for Linux to go on to
  
• Don't partition any free space in advance for Linux
  
• Let a Linux distribution partition this Free Space when your installing it.
  
• When installing Linux, choose the option to install into the "existing free space" just make sure you've got some left on your drive
  
• Install either GRUB or LILO to the MBR
  
  

Yeah skyline pretty much said it all right there. You don't want to (it won't let you obviously) pre partition for linx. Your distro should have a partitioning tool on it What you can do if you do not want to format your disk is to:

Defrag the drive in windows

Redistribute the partitioning of the drive (your distro should have some program capable of doing that) giving a formatable partition for linux while leaving part of the old partition for windows.

Run install as usual

No guarrentes windows will still work properly....Windows really does suck ( out of the two systems I used this method on one remainded optional and the other one froze as you tried to boot windows)


Best of luck to you

To Skyline:

so let say u oredy have Windows XP on c:


which means u go on straight to install linux, and eventually use the Disk Druid or fdisk to partition during installation right??

:Pengy:

in addition...
 

maybe you should reserve some space for the /boot partition in the first 512 MB of your primary master.
It could be helpful to start LINUX;o)

A nice distribution could be Mandrake 9.x because of its own partitioning-tool which is able to resize ntfs partitions. It's the only distribution I know with this feature.

Red Hat also has a resizing tool, but it is kinda screwy to activate.


Red Hat is a really good distro for newbies

Hi everyone,

I installed Slackware and as I begin to boot from the linux box, the monitor just display GRUB. please help.

Hi everyone,

I installed Slackware and as I begin to boot from the linux box, the monitor just display GRUB. please help.

Oh. I've got the same problem after modifying the Partition Magic setting under windows (I have dual boot). If you type -help you could see the help. But at that moment I did not have time for these all and had to finish some jobs. So I just Reinstalled windows and Linux (sounds stupid, but really I have no materials to read, nor the internet at that moment).

I am also looking for the answer for this question. Thank you all.

I would also add that you might want to turn off virtual memory before you defrag the drive (assuming that Microsoft's latest bugware allows you to do that).

-C

Have you tried LILO rather than GRUB? I realize GRUB is really nifty-cool, but it does have some idiosyncrasies.

-C

Hi Umok

Yes - you would use disk driud - all the major distribution's installers come with partitioning tools built in - so - you dont need to set up partitions in advance using either Windows tools or a 3rd party propriartry tool - you just leave some free space and let the Linux distribution set up its own filesystem in a partiton in the free space.

take a screenshot in partitionmagic by hitting {prt scrn} on your keyboard (top row third from right) and then paste the picture in paint or something. show the picture in this thread so i can see what your hdd partitions look like then i can help you from there

I have a copy of Mandrake 9.1 which I had purchased from someone. I have done as Skyline said and unpartioned the drive and started running the installation disk in my system to install Linux. As the installation disk was running the program would show hda: lost interupt and then would start checking the partion of the drive. While checking the partition the message unable to handle kernel NULL pointer message would be displayed and then <0>kernel panic: AIEE, killing interupt handler!, Interupt handler - not syncing would be displayed and then the system would lock and go no further. Does anyone know why this would happen and if so help would be greatly appreciated. Needless to say, this is quite frustrating. Thanks for helping in advance. I have a screenshot but I'm unable to post it.
Dakota

My $.02
I have used Partition Magic to create Linux ext2 and swap partitions just so that I didn't have unpartitioned space on the hard drive (From Windows perspective) Normally, 3 or 4 Gigabytes is enough for a full install of Mandrake 9.0. (You can get by with a lot less.) When you boot the Mandrake setup CD, use the partitioning tool it provides to setup the various Linux partitions. On a dual boot machine, I normally install M$ Windows in a primary partition on the first 2 or 3 GB of the drive. I then use PM8 to create Logical partitions. Note that GNU/Linux names the primary hard drive hda. The first primary partition is call hda1. The first logical partition is called hda5. (Learning the naming convention will save you much heart ache later.) I normally create 3 partitions in the extended logical drive. Those being a / , swap, and /usr . (The forward slash is the root partition, and is where most of the "guts" are installed. Typically, a minimum of 2 GB is necessary, depending on your installation.) GNU/Linux needs some swap space. As a rule, 1.5 times the physical memory is adequate for swap. (This is dependent on your particular hardware.) Whatever space is left over can be assigned to /usr. I normally install LILO to MBR. This method omits Boot Magic altogether. LILO can be set to default to either of the OSes you have installed. This method has worked for me every time, however it is only one user's opinion. I hope some of the information is helpful.