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I have 2 harddrives, but when I type fdisk sda, the hd I want to install my linux, then p for the list, I only see hdb, my second drive, sda contains windows xp, how do I get it to show up?
also, you should make sure the drive isn't mounted before you do this. is linux installed on your other drive? check /etc/fstab and if you see any entries with /dev/sda then make sure to unmount them before you run fdisk.
Are you sure your first hd is /dev/sda then it is a SCSI hard drive. And if it is then it's a little weird (I think) that you other hd is on /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hda
You can also use the more friendly cfdisk. It works as fdisk but is much easier from my point of view.
also, why do you want to partition a drive with windows xp on it? fdisk will destroy any data on the disk. if you want to save anything, use something like partion magic.
Had the same problem sort of, enraged me so much I gave up on Slackware for about 3 days and then I slowly crawled back to Slack and forced myslef to sit through the whole install until Slack was on. It worked.
Try cfdisk, easier to use in my opinion. Then try "cfdisk /dev/hdb" NOTE: The "hdb" is only an example, put whatever drive you need to in that place is need be. You should now have access to it, delete whatever you need to, enter "New" and write to the new. Now go to setup. Assuming you want to use your entire drive that's what you would do, if not do not delete anything just create a new partition.
Do not put anything on your Win drive or you will lose it. Get a hard drive just for Linux, hd are cheap these days for a small 5-10 gig. You already noted that you have two discs so I dunno what's going on. Basically you need to know what drive you want Linux on, then type "cfdisk /dev/....." as I said before.
BTW, a little tid-bit of personal info would be that my master drive is "hda" and my slave is "hdb", I'm not saying yours has to be this way I'm just telling you what I have. I dunno where you're getting sda.
/dev/sda is a scsi hard drive. nothing strange about that. i'm just curious why his ide drive would be hdb instead of hda, but maybe that's determined by master/slave state, and maybe his ide drive is the slave. that's what i assumed, anyway.
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