I am using linux for six months and find very easy installation even with slackware. Last month I downloaded arch 0.7.2 (Noodles) and tried to install it on ext3 partition along with windows xp on fat32 partion and three more fat32 logical partitions. Bu all gone down when mount the root drive during installtion. All my partitions get up-down with data loss. Please help me to install arch along with windows xp without harming my data on fat32 partition because I heared arch is great.

My system architecture is Intel Pentium 3 500Mhz, 256 SD Ram, 80 G.B IDE HDD, CD/DVD Combo Drive, 15'' L.G Monitor

well you can only have 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and one extended.

That would be where I would start first.

If you use the Arch "auto prepare disk" it will create two partitions.

You need to make sure your partitions are setup correctly.

I personally would suggest buying a cheap harddrive to install arch on.

you heard correctly

soule

No soulestream you heard wrong I have one primary fat32 partition and 4 logical fat32 partition and one ext3 partition, one swap partition.
Is there no solutuion to install arch 0.7.2 on same HD as window xp because my pocket doesn't allow to buy some other hd and have a experiment. Please tell me way out.

well if the ext3 and swap are primary partitions then you should be good to go. Just make sure you tell arch the proper drives to install on (obviously)

I usually use cfdisk to prepare the drive. Just make sure not to touch the fat32 drives. When you said you trashed your drives, did you try to resize the drives?

might want to ask over at the archforums if you are still having problems.


soule

Thabks for all your help but after messing with my friends hard drive I finally make arch install with win xp but feel very sad because first disk image was seem to be corrupt because X11 package and more were not installing, will try to download again.

Do you know something about Suse Linux 10.0. I want to try also Suse but some of my known told me that Novell is soon to release 10.1 version which is totally different from its precedors.