hey everyone

i am installing Slackware 10.2 for the first time ever on my Western Digital 250 Gigabyte SATA harddrive. I have no idea how to go about doing this. I already have Windows XP Pro installed on my NTFS partition. How do I partition the freespace so it can be a Linux partition? Also, i saw on alot of posts people talking about a sata.i driver. Where do I find this driver and how do i load it so I can install the operating system? Also are there any special instructions I need to follow because this is an SATA drive? Also, when i want to cfdisk to partition, should i call the device /dev/hda or /dev/sda? This is the only harddrive installed in my system. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Repartitioning the drive

1. Defrag your windows drive so that all your data is at the begining of the drive and all the free space is at the end.
2. Use a tool like Partition Magic to resize the NTFS partition to the size you require. I have in the past used the partition resizer on an old Mandrake 9 install disk to do this then quit the process and then installed the distro i wanted. Most modern distros will have a partition resizer as part of the install routine but i can't comment on their reliability.

SATA

This all depends on the manufacturer of the SATA controller on your motherboard. A bit of googling and searchs on this forum will help determine whether its possible.

The device should show up under /dev/sda

i downloaded the first 2 boot image cd files and i burnt each one to a cd, do i need a boot floppy to load any drivers?

Hi,

To install slackware using the cd1 to boot, just place the cd in your cdrom device. You might have too go into your bios to set the cdrom as the first boot device.

You could search on LQ as this has been covered several times.
Or you could check online references such as #4 in my sig.

Slackbasics has some install instructions!

HTS! Help Thy Self

HTH!

Make sure you backup all your important data too. Regular backups have saved my butt on more than one occasion.

As for installing it, I just change my BIOS to boot from CDROM and then put the first Slack disc in and let it do its thing. I'm sure there are better/more efficient ways to do it, but it's probably the easiest way to do it the first time.

After you prep your drive as outlined in the first post, when you boot from CD1, at the boot: prompt, you type sata.i and hit <enter>

FYI, this instructs the installer to use the kernel module that has been compiled with SATA support.

Later on during the installation, you will be asked about installing a kernel to the installation. It should remember that you used sata.i, but in the event it doesn't, specify sata.i from the CD (it will instruct you to re-insert CD1 if it isn't there already).

Good luck, and patience is a virtue, but it's all about learning, right?

I just did this the other night, and it worked like a charm.