Installing Fedora 5 as 2nd OS on a SATA HDD
 

Hi guys.., yes I am a newbie and regarding my question I have found similar ones but with differences.

My system:

AOpen AX4SPE-UN, 2Gb RAM, HDD 80Gb on 1st IDE channel (holding XP... yes, I can feel the grimaces on the faces reading this post) and a 80Gb SATA as primary and a 250Gb SATA as secondary at the on board SATA controller. The SATA controller on BIOS (v1.16 for my model) is set up on "Auto" which sets the 80Gb as master and the 250Gb as secondary.

I wanted and still want to install Fedora Core 5.

Well, I've partitioned the first 30Gb of the 250Gb SATA HDD and let it unallocated so Fedora could made the job. I chose "Use free space on HDD and default partitioning" (don´t remember now the exact words) and selected the proper device which is \dev\sdb so it kept going on with no probs (of course, I told the installer I wanted dual boot and wanted GRUB placed on \dev\hda with XP as default) until it told me to reboot. The system never saw GRUB... it started XP without taking any notice of it.

So, went back and partitioned those 30Gb manually, which I liked it 'cause it made me learn about Linux file system and so on..); I made a 102Mb primary ext3 /boot partition, a 1984Mb swap part and the rest of it as a ext3 / partition. I totally dumped the VLM thing as I still don´t know what it is; so, installed again but it turned out to be the same as the first attempt.

I guess the prob lies on the BIOS configuration but haven´t tinkered with it yet and guessed that there is an answer or two you boys and girls (I guess there is a whole bunch of girls mastering Linux!!) can hand to me.

Well, that is my first question and introduction.

Best regards,

Armando

For a start your FC5 should call Sata as sda and sdb.

hda is reserved for the IDE disk.

You are right in dumping the LVM. You only need two partitions; one for swap and another one for the root "/" of FC5. IN this arrangement /boot is automatically as a subdirectory to /.

Just go in as an expert, select an partition and edit it for mounting /, select formatting to Ext3 and click OK. FC5 installer will know what to do with the swap if there is one there.

When it comes to the boot loader select Sdb if you don't want XP's MBR in sda to be overwritten. You then use the Bios to switch sdb to boot before sda. Thereafter you will have FC5 but XP should be temporarily out of action.

XP can be booted by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst of FC5, by adding this lines
Save the file and you XP will become available after a reboot. The two map statements switch the disk order just before XP is booted and revert back automatically to current state on exiting XP.

More details and explanation in the Section A of the second link in my signature. The booting tips Link also have plenty inoframtion relevant to you.

Have fun.