Please excuse my poor spelling on the topic, i ran spell checker but didnt catch my error within the topic. Not to keen when i wrote this :-/

I have a pc with the following config:

PIII 500 MHZ
256 MB ram
Onboard sound and Video
1 10 GIG HD (HDA) HDA1 = windows 2000 running fat 32
1 40 GB HD HDC (MDK 9.2)

I have this spare pc lieing around and since have been using it for learning linux, i gown to prefer RH8 over Mandrake and so have planned to install FC2.

Here is my question:

HD 1 has two Fat32 partitions, one for windows and one as a backup, redhat 8 is also on here (/boot , / , and /swap partitions). On the second hard drive MDK 9.2 is stored. What i want to do is wipe out all RH8 partitions and my backup partiton and make one giant fat 32 back up. So the first HD would have windows on one partitions and a gaint fat32 backup on its second patrion. On the second HD i want to whipe off MDK and put PC2 on it.

Is this the correct steps to preform this?:

Use the anaconda installer's disk druid

Delete all the RH and backup partitions on HDA 1 while preserving windows 2000

Create a gaint fat32 partition using whats left of that drive.

Delete all partitions on HDC
create a /boot, /, and /swap for FC2 on HDC
Let disk druid do all that
and put the Grub boot loader on the MBR of HDA

Is that correct?

Also does this MBR bug affect fat 32 windows installs or only NTFS?

I know i asked alot but i want to do this right

Thanks.

Yes you're right. I have used GRUB in the MBR w/ XP on NTFS and 2000 on NTFS and FAT32...so hopefully you have no problems. Make a 2000 and linux bootdisk just incase though.

If you are planning to implant GRUB on the MBR that is part of the Windows 2000 partition, you might want to use Windows 2000 multiboot program instead. If windows 2000 runs into disk problems, windows disk utilities have a bad habit of doing bad things to GRUB.

You can use google to find the steps how to use Microsoft's mulitboot program to boot Linux. It usually involves copying the first 512 kb of the linux boot partition with dd and copying that file to the windows partition, then adding an entry in the windows boot.ini file. But if grub is not installed on the MBR, how do I get to the linux partition? I used a rescue boot disk or boot from the installation CD to gain access to that partition.

Always make a boot disk for both operating system in case something goes wrong in the future.

I found something like this: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm


Is setting up the NT boot loader to work with linux really necessary?

Any other suggestion? or can anyone confrim if my way will work? or any other ways?

I could do it that way but i though i heard somewhere that the NT loader wasnt very good for booting linux.

basically i did some looking and it looks like bootpart takes the NT loader and links it to grub so when you boot off of HDA 1 and the NTloader appears if i choose linux it sends it to grub on hdc to take over. At least thats what i read in maximum pc

What way do you guys suggest? I am either gonna order FC2 tonight or tomorrow or mabey just play it safe and get FC1 or something. I really wanted FC 2 though.

I have a dual boot of FC 1 and W2K w/ Grub on the MBR and it works fine. Maybe if fedora 2 has problems you could install FC 1 and do an upgrade?