Hello all. Im not a moron with computers, but I dont know nix and I dont have a bloody clue for anything to do with Linux.

I got Fedora Core because a someone recommended that over Debian for a Linux n00b13 like me.

Now I want to dual boot my system, I have Win XP Pro with 2 40-gig HD's. But that is irrelevant because one is only music with nothing else. When I go to use partition magic it gives me an option at what type of Partition. There are options like 'Linux LX2' (something like that) and 'Linux LX3'. Does anyone know what that means? I was thinking just to make a partition but now there is all sorts of choices and crap.

What should I do? Just make a plain NTFS partition and install Linux on that? Would that be possible?

And a final thing, is 20 gigs enough room to be installing a decent Fedora system?

Id appreciate any help, thankies

Just leave empty space for FC1. You can let the installer put it on the empty space for you. It will handle the formating of new partitions and such. 20 gigs is plenty of space. You can get a full install of it and have some room to play on a 5 gig empty space. But the more space the better.

Also, you will not be able to write to your NTFS partitions, and you will have to put a little bit of effort into reading them if you want to do so.

Not able to write to my NTFS? You mean FC isnt NTFS compatable? Shit. What is it compatible with? Because I have a 40 gig NTFS HD with only music. Would it be able to play files and crap offa that or will it just not read NTFS at all?

There is currently no linux distro that has full read/write access to NTFS. Some will let you read it. if you go to http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora1.html then you can install that and get around it (they have instructions on the site). What I do with my dual boot system is have windows on ntfs, use linux on ext3 and then have my data (mp3s, movies, word docs, etc etc) on a fat32 partition. Linux has full read/write to fat32.

I've installed kernel 2.6.3 on my system so I was able to get ntfs read access, but since you are brand new to linux, I wouldn't recommend that for now.

edit: I think that patition magic can make ntfs to fat32. I've successfully done it before. Windows 2000/xp can go from fat to ntfs, but not the otherway around.

Yeh. thankies

But it is a pain to put 30 gigs of mp3s onto another HD with only 25 gigs of room, reformat the music HD with Fat32, then move em back. Itll lose me alot I guess Ill just bugger about with linux and use windows for music.

If you have to reformat you don't have to loose anything....

Move what you can from hd2 to hd1.

resize the partition on hd2 down very small and create a fat32 partition behind it.

move your mp3s to the fat32 partition

then delete the ntfs partition and move and resize the fat32.

A couple extra steps, but you didn't lose a thing. Also, like I said in the edit above, you might can just use PM to change the file system.

True true. But it still is a pain in the ass to do it

I would put a third HD but that is getting excessive, plus I aint got the room in my case

Pauli,

You don't have to reformat. Check what benjithegreat98 said above:

> edit: I think that patition magic can make ntfs to fat32. I've successfully
> done it before. Windows 2000/xp can go from fat to ntfs, but not the
> otherway around.

You can convert NTFS to Fat32 with Partition Magic (depending on your version of PM). I do it all the time. :-)

Pauli,

If you are using PartitionMagic 8 (PM8), it has a built-in setup wizard for Linux and windows. If you are using an older version of PM, you need to make a “Linux Swap” partition about twice the size of your memory and an “Ext3" partition of at least 10GB for some comfort if you plan a full installation of Fedora. I always convert the swap and ext3 partitions into a logical partition, but they will work fine as primary partitions.

During the Fedora installation, select the “manually format drive” option (I don’t remember the exact wording), deselect formatting of the swap partition and set the ext3 partition as the root “/” partition. There is an extensive help page available from PowerQuest (now Symantec) about this and several other Linux-related issues (just search for “Linux” at the PowerQuest site). See:

How to Partition Your Hard Disk to Install Linux on a Windows System: http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id3983.cfm

But big hard drives have gotten cheap and PM makes copying your old windows NTFS/FAT32 partitions to the new drive easy, especially if you do it from dos (PM can make a dos bootable disk for just this purpose). If you plan to boot from the new drive, be sure to run “FDISK /MBR” (writes the master boot record onto the new drive) from dos (Win95,98,ME Startup Disk) so that your new drive will for sure boot.

If you plan to use BootMagic 8 (which comes with PM8) to drive the dual boot process, be sure to write GRUB to the first sector of the bootable partition, not to the master boot record. It’s an advanced option for the boot loader during the Fedora installation. See:

Installing Red Hat Linux in a Multiple Boot Scenario:
http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id3280.cfm

Yeah. I found that converting thing It worked like a charm.

And I got Fedora on in about 1 hour! Im happy about that, but now I cannot access any of my files on the other drives (even the Fat32 one). I was wondering why. I want to be able to access my music on both Windows and Linux.

I will help you get started on your search on how to do it. You need to add a line to the /etc/fstab file and create a sub-directory in the /mnt directory. There is lots of info on how to mount a fat32 drive in fedora (or redhat, which would be the same steps) in this forum and google.

here's a few posts from here

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=97292
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=58294

*huggles*

Thankies!

Oi hate being a st00pid

Oh yeah, what size swap should I put? I have a 2 gig one right now, but is that too big? becuase its the max...

Most people say 2x your memory. If you have 256 MB of memory then your swap would be 512 MB. If you don't use that much swap then you can go with less, however. Just depends from person to person.

I only have 256 of rambus Curses that stuff is expensive, and you gotta get TWO!