I downloaded the 3 Red Hat 9 iso files to a folder on my c: drive called rh. I then created a boot disk, booted into the install and selected "hard drive" as source. Now it asks me to pick a partition and folder, so I type in the info and it tells me that it doesn't exists. What am I doing wrong? I do this a few months ago with no problems. Currently I have winxp running with a ntfs formatted filesystem, before I had used fat32 until I learned of the benifets. Is this causing the problem or what? Other than that there are no other differences. =/

Yeah - one of the "benefits" of NTFS is that they're very secretive about their complicated gizmos and write support is *very* sketchy, resizing is hard, and even reading NTFS partitions may not be supported. Probably some special RH kernel you can get but you might be better off burning them to CD.

-- Well, on second thought, the kernel really should support reading from NTFS, so maybe that isn't it. Seems like the likeliest suspect, though.

Mandrake 9.1 is the only one that supports "native" ntfs resizing at this time, although it just uses software that's available from sourceforge. NTFS is a wonderful thing, as long as your only wish is to have something better than fat32, and the headaches aren't worth it if you use other OS's.

I believe that is your problem as RH deliberately left out NTFS support in these newer releases.

See about moving them to a fat32 partition or burning them...

Another thought is what is the drive scheme you are using to 'point' to them?

Cool

I wish I had known this two weeks ago. That's when I reinstalled windows and converted to ntfs, lol. Does this mean that even if I burn the cd's and install it, I'm gonna have a problem reading/writing from the ntfs drive?

and master c, I'm a bit unsure of what you mean by your question reguarding my drive scheme. What ya mean exactly?

Are you using windoze drive naming scheme:
C:\
Or are you using linux:
/path/to/file

?

I've never done an HD install, but I'd think you'd need to provide Linux drive naming scheme.



Cool

With RH it sounds like it's going to pretty difficult, yeah. I can read mine - haven't even tried to write to them. I just made a shared FAT partition that both OSes can read and write to. This is only until I can make my flippin' cdrecord work *completely* - then I won't need W2K. Anyway - yeah, it sounds like you're going to have problems with RH and NTFS.

-- If I remember right, MasterC's right about the pathnames.

Well I was using a linux naming scheme. So I assume it is most definately my ntfs drive. And with the way it's sounding ntfs is gonna give me a fight with storing and reading data once I get linux up and running so I think I might just use partition magic to resize the drive and slice me up a fat 32 piece. Anyone care for a slice? I have whip cream.. anyways I do appreciate the help everyone, wish me luck. I'll give a report back afterwards and let you know how it turns out.

Mmm, is it pumpkin fat32? I could really go for some pumpkin!



Good Luck

Cool

I think it's still a bit early for pumpkin but I have some fresh apple and cherry.

Ok, well... I tried using partition magic to resize the drive, it rebooted and strangly took 4 seconds, rebooted and had a screen pop up saying it was finished. Started up windows and checked and nope, it didn't resize it and make the partition. I opened up partition magic and confirmed that it did nothing. No idea what happened but I tried it 4 more times and still nothing. Strange, I had just use the resize function 2 weeks ago when I converted it all back into one drive and it worked fine. Anyways, I've come to a conclusion that either, I find a way to install it via my network computer OR I reinstall windows and set it to fat 32 and should have no problems from there. If I follow up with step number 2 I hear that norton ghost MAY be able to pull a full drive backup for me, is this true? I don't want to waste money on unreturnable software that won't do nothin for me.

And btw, is red hat really worth all this? Or perhaps should I install a diff flavor? I'm sorta a noob still, and I've messed around with different versions of red hat and mandrake. Even gave slackware a try once but I had a bit of trouble with it. What would you guys recommend for a not COMPLETE noob, but a noob still. I want something powerful and secure and will be able to do functions such as, web browsing, ftp/web serving, and I love red hats (windows like) auto update feature, if another distro has that that would better suit me over red hat that'd be great.

Well, RH may be the *only* distro being weird like that so maybe any other distro would suit you. It seems Mandrake is rather RH-like but much more NTFS-compatible. I'd say Slack, obviously, but you say you had problems with it. Maybe if it was an older version a newer one would work better for you. But I suspect Mandrake or SuSe or Slack or most anything would suit you. Maybe Mandrake is the most RH+NTFS sort of thing. Unfortunately.

Don't know anything about PM or Norton Ghost, though, sorry.

with partition magic, make sure u apply the update (assuming u are using partition magic 8, the update brings it to 8.01 and fixes lots of bugs and may fix yours)

4 seconds to do partition work? See if u can try that again and read what it is doing, post it here (i've never really had any trouble with partition magic except its file browser which doesn't seem to like unnamed linux partitions)

also, this might be risky, but use partition magic to convert your ntfs C: drive to fat32 (but i'm not sure if it allows this on primary partitions)

as for it "worth" going to redhat 9: it depends on if you really want to get away from windows or are just experimenting with linux for the heck of it: if u want to move away from windows and feel confident about maybe having to lose data, go for redhat, convert those partitions, do whatever it takes; if you are just experimenting, perhaps try mandrake and see if its ntfs util will do the trick (and if it does, u may also be able to install over that with redhat)

note that both redhat and mandrake seem like a good fit for you (you might like redhat better though)


oh, and with redhat, don't expect to go very far with ntfs right off the bat; you'll need to do just a little work to get that working but it is really easy (if you just want to install an rpm)

Ok I applied the update but it didn't help it. When I first set it all up and hit apply it tells me it has to reboot my system. My system reboots and I get the "preparing to load press a key to abort" screen. It loads and then it said something like about to process....1-2 seconds later it flashes a few lines of text and the only thing I can really catch is it talking about process drive c:/ and it's converting and that it reached 100%. That was at the bottom line. Then it reboots and I get another PM8 screen that says it was successful then it proceeds to load winxp. I check it and it's still not successful although it had told me, roughly, 8 times it has been. =/