Hi all,
I'm new to linux environment. I have PIII 500 64mb and two harddisks.
On first HD 40GB and partitioned to 15GB/15GB/10GB, I installed win98SE. The second HD 20 GB and partitioned to 10GB/10GB and formated in DOS.
I want to install Mandrake 9.1 into first partition of second HD.
How can I resize this partition to use full capacity for linux in installing process.
Thanks in advance.

you will given the option to do it during the installation. Just proceed with it and you will be asked where you want to have mandrake installed. You can also delete, create, resize partition at that point. You will need a swap partiton (~250MB) and a / partition and maybe a /home partition (/home is where your personal data go; you don't have to have a separate one but is often convenient). So you should break up the drive into three linux partitions. One swap, 5GB or so for /, and the rest for /home. or something like that.

I think you'll understand what's going on when you get to that stage. If not, you can just break off the installation - nothing will be written to your hd till then - and ask again in the forum.

Thanks quatsch for quick answer.
Your are right that I have a choice to resize the partition. So I have hdb which is divided into two partitions that are still belongs to windows. First partition is 10GB in size with FAT32 system. When I resize, should I move the slider to leftmost so all capacity is given to linux and then break up in to / , swap and /home partitions ?

BTW, is 64MB memory enough for Mandrake9.1 ?

Thanks again for your help

64MB is enough - barely, though, if you want to run KDE (it would be like trying to run XP). But there are lighter environments that will be fine (icewm will be installed by default and it should work fine).

What I would do is delete the two partitions first - I think there are buttons for this on the left side. Then create the three partitions you need. Choose ext3 as the file system type for / and /home (swap is swap).

Did you mean that I should prepare the second hd as one big partition 20GB and then create three linux partitions in it ?
I planned to use only half capacity for linux, that is 10GB.
Hope that you can help to elaborate on this.
Thank you.

Try this how to. Might help.

http://www.linuxsolved.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10

Later

the link dalek gave you is very nice.

I thought you wanted to use the whole 20G. If not, 'delete' one of the 10GB partitions which will free up space. Then create the linux partitions in that 10GB space. A 'partition' is unfree space so in order to create new space you must get rid of it first which is just to say that an entry in the partition table gets changed. A 'drive' in windows is a partition and not simply the disk (it's one of those bad terminology choices that MS made).

When you install Mandrake, just choose 'custom partitioning' and you can make the partitions whatever size you want.

I made mine this size. I do plan to redo mine though. Little tweaking.

/boot 200 MB
/root 5GB
/home 2GB

You should have this at a minimum.

swap 400 MB
/root 2GB
/home 1GB

You wrote that you plan to use 10GBs

Start with this, just my two cents worth. This is a pretty good and stable setup.

/boot 200MB
/root 2GB
/usr 3GB
/home 4GB
swap 500MB

The /usr is where most all the programs go. It can get really big. The /home is where your user settings and documents folder goes. If you have a lot of files, that can be big. Most of this depends on what you plan to do with Linux.

Just follow the how to and you can easily add the extra partitions. Also note that each of those listed above is a seperate partition also called mount points in Linux. You will have three partitions if you choose auto, a swap, a /root and a /home. That is a basic setup. The setup listed above will have 5 partitions.

Thanks quatsch, I had a heck of a time getting that thing done. It was worth it though. I have them on several sites and link to them at random.

Hope that helps.

Dear quatsch and dalek,
Thank you so much for information you gave me. It was very enlightening and open my eyes to linux. As I wrote before, I planned to use 10GBs of second hd for linux. When I tried to install Mandrake 9.1, I partitioned 10GBs into three, those are : /, /swap and /home. I thought that I have done all steps that installation disk wants me to do. I wondered in what partition the Mandrake files were written, were they in / ? Anyway, the installation was complete and ask for reboot. When I reboot by choosing linux in bootloader, apparently the system could not load KDE because I could not get desktop although I have waited for 10 minutes , What was wrong ?
Thanks in advance.

Most, almost all, of the files are in /. swap is used when you run out of phiscal ram. /home contains user specific configurations and stuff.

the trouble might be that your system has too little ram for KDE. Try this:
at the boot menu press ESC. Then type in
linux 3

This should get you to a text login. Login and then try
startx starticewm

This should start icewm which is a much lighter desktop environment than kde. If it starts, you can set it as your default desktop somewhere in mandrake control center (you probably have other desktops as well; you should try them out).

Oh I see. Thanks quatsch.
I'll try it and back later to you with result.

Hi,
I have tried to login with startx starticewm and succeeded to show desktop. I still wondered the way to add programs because I saw from Linux menu that program item is still empty. How can I reach the files directory in icewm. Have tried to click menus but none likely to take me to directory.

do you mean that the whole menu is empty?

Do you have an icon or something like that on the task bar that you can click to open a terminal window? If you do, try the command

konqueror

I think this will open up a file browser (not sure though; konqueror is a kde program which does run on my setup inside icewm but I'm not sure about yours).
Anyhow, you can start the menu editor with

menudrake

and you can start mandrake control center where you can do all sorts of things including adding and removing programs with the command

mcc

You will be asked for the root password for mcc. Hope this helps.

Thanks quatsch,
Actually I can get terminal window when I load icewm desktop. Yes, when I clicked Linux menu, a pull up menu is opened where I saw some buttons like Terminal, Configuration, Program and so on.
But when I clicked Program button, it showed empty.
Sure, I will try your suggestions and hope that my problems will be solved and back with you with results.
Thanks again.

You can just switch the hard drives in the computer, and them replace it as the second.