Help installing Linux on a slave HD
 

OK folks here is my problem. I tried Partitioning my 120gig HD and installing Slackware 9.0 on the Linux partition for a dual boot system. I used Partition Magic to make a Linux Partition. After having some luck I realized that I didnt have the OS just some kind of Dos prompt screen and my XP was chugging when I started it up. .......So I went out and bought a new 40 gig HD, downloaded the Yarrow-SPRMS for Fedora Core, installed the HD as a slave to my original. Well the ISO's I downloaded arent bootable? So I made a boot disk ( didnt work either ), so now I,m kinda stuck. How do I go about setting up a dual boot system with windoze XP and Fedora Core, on my slave drive??? I appreciate any help :scratch: :scratch: :scratch:

I have linux, win98, winxp and solaris on one hd and no problem.

What do you mean by
"After having some luck I realized that I didnt have the OS just some kind of Dos prompt screen and my XP was chugging when I started it up."

When you use PartitionMagic. Use manual partitioning. Do not use the install a new operating system option presented by PartitionMagic. Resize the existing partition and create a slice for your linux installation. Once created. Reboot into linux with ur installation cd. When presented with the boot loader option choose to install it into MBR. On certain machines (actually BIOSes), they are not capable to boot partitions above 8GB. So that's why you need to install it into the MBR and maybe create a 120MB partition as the first partition and assign it to /boot.

Yarrow-SPRMS for Fedora Core is not the binary you need for installations it is the Source Red Hat Package Manager and its SRPM... not SPRM... You need the yarrow-binary-i386-iso for installation.

Cheers.

Well my computer was very slow, thats what I meant by "chugging" As far as Slackware, it wasnt a OS, I dont think. I have never installed a Linux system before i,m a complete :newbie: . I guess I,l d/l the i386 and try it.
I still dont know how to assign the Slave HD to dual boot though.

Hey VisionZ. Did you burn the ISO's you downloaded to cd's?

Yes I most certainly did, but I downloaded the wrong ones. I,m in the Process of downloading the new ones. Then I,m gonna Partitions some of my 120g hd to install boot magic, then partition my 40gig one to linux. Is This going to work??

I don't know why you are bothering with partitioning, unless you want to restrict the amount of space for the os. And the boot magic thing? I'm not sure that you need it either. I boot Fedora, Mandrake and WinXP and they're all on 1 hard disk. No 3rd party boot loaders here. I installed Windows first, then Fedora (at which point grub automatically took over), and then Mandrake, and now they are all handled by lilo. I did have to alter lilo.conf so that I could boot Fedora after Mandrake install.

I wouldn't use any partition magic thing... Redhat9 installer had a partitioning tool, so I would think Fedora has one too. Just boot from the CD and install, a bootloader should install along with Fedora. IIRC, with redhat, you wouldn't even need to edit grub.conf to get Windows there.

Hi lotheac,

1. Fedora or Redhat doesn't do online partitioning for your existing windows. Therefore you cannot do online partitioning with the disk druid given - if you mean during the installation process.
2. NTFS support is still in the early stages. That's y it's still not supported in the "original" kernel when u install redhat/fedora. You need 2 recompile the kernel to get the support. So the tools do not guarantee your data integrity upon repatitioning. Yes you could use the fips to split existing partition into 2 but as i mentioned no guarantee that your data will stay intact - personal experience, on the negative part;)
3. You don't need to edit the grub.conf file because anaconda installer already detected that you have a Windows partition (fat, fat32, ntfs) and will add it automatically for you. If you were to do a fresh installation and repartition using fdisk to create a dos partition, anaconda will not add this new partition to grub, that's why you are given the choice of "add" in the grub screen.

That's why, if you have an existing windows installation that uses up all your existing space, the recomended approach is to have a partitioning tool in windows do it for you - that is, shrink up the windows partition to free up space.

As I've mentioned earlier the SRPMS, is not for installation, those are just images of the source codes;) You need the binary iso's to do installation, and with fedora/redhat you do not really need to burn the images to do installation. You could use the expert mode to do installation, when presented with the installation source, just select hd image....

VisionZ.... yes the 120g 40g is gonna work. You don't really need that much disk space(40g) for a full installation. Installing "everything" in Fedora would take up approx. 7g (including swap space).

BTW, I have redhat 9, solaris 9, fedora, win98, winxp on my laptop.

NarutoKun:
I had understood he had wanted to install linux on another hard drive entirely (topic?). That wouldn't touch your windows install.

Thanks for trying to help Naruto, but I was explaing what had failed for me in the past. I did however download the i386 ISO's and what I had to do is blank out my existing HD. Load the install disk and it configured itself for dualboot. Now I have a huuuge HD for Linux. Thanks for the help everyone.:)