Fedora C3, want to dual boot and have access to bkup drive.
 

Ok, after another hit from a damn worm with SP2 vulnerabilities I finally said to hell with it. I will use Fedora Core for all my computing I want to make it a 40GB partition. and the other 80 for my Windows Gaming. I also have a 120GB drive that I have my music and images on.

Now, I have to figure out how to make this work. I used to run SuSE for a while and dual booting was easy. Install Linux, Install Windows, have fun. Problems I have now. I chose not to let Linux touch my secondary HDD. I installed over everything on the Primary so that I can keep my data. Now I am guessing but I do not want to screw this up since its another system. I just pop in my Windows XP CD and use it's partition creator to take a chunk out of my Linux partition? And some nice selector will come up asking which OS I want to boot into?

Second question.
I can not find how to initialize the second HDD so I can play my music files and access my DOCs on it. How do I go about this in FC3?

Once again I am not a complete n00b but I am still very n00bish and am only taking my first Linux class this semester.

Thanks for any help, Skuggi.

Ok, firstly the best way to get a dual boot system up and running is to install Windows first and then Linux. Now if you are willing to follow this option I would suggest visiting this link: http://geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

Assuming you have a newish computer and that you havent customised linux too much yet I would urge you in this direction. It is by far the best method. If you have made some changes I would recommend backing up your $HOME directory (ie /home/youruser) onto a CD (if possible) or HDD. This will preserve most if not all your personalizations.

Secondly, about your other HDD. I will assume that its formated in a Microsoft format such as NTFS. To access NTFS you will need to make sure your kernel supports it. Try the following command:
where hdxy is something like hdc0 (ie the drive and partition numbers) and '/mnt/storage' is what you want to call the mount point. If that returns an error like NTFS not supported then I suggest you go here and download the relevant RPM to give your system NTFS support. You might need to reboot. Following that, try the above command again and it should work and when you
you should see all your music and docs etc.

Any problems just let us know, I will remain subscribed.

Tag on one more question. Why does workstation not appear to have GCC installed?

And other than re-installing which would be a mild pain anyway to get GCC on easily? Or am I going to have to select another installation type?

Thanks again, Skuggi.

Thats a fairly straight forward process, very similar to WinXP. There is a utility under 'Applications > System Settings' called Add/Remove Applications. This little tool will add new programs from the installation CDs if you have them and take care of dependencies.

You will find GCC probably under the developement section. If that doesnt work, get back to us.

Ok, Installed XP over the FC3 Install while i was going to bed last night, finished up this morning. Now that first bit on that link you gave was ok to me but there was a lot of greek in it with the /boot.

As I get it which seems too easy is.

Go grab partition magic and make my linux partition.
Since I'm using a new comp dont worry bout the 1024 cycle rule.
Install FC3 to that.

Now the question?
And the GRUB will pick up the dual installs?
Or does the NTBLD pick up the dual installs and allow you to choose from that?

I was thinking of doing it that way to begin with, but I remembered the problems I had dual booting SuSE 8 and Win2k back when I first started 'playing' with linux. Is it really this simple? I am in class now and hope to have the dual booting before I get to work and when I get home go through getting all my stuff configured and setup on both systems.

Also it just felt so nice for those few minutes last night working within FC3 :D I'm really happy with it.

It certainly is that simple. I have both FC3 and WinXP running on the one HDD not bothering eachother. GRUB will pick up Windows as 'Other'. You can rename this to whatever you want and even set as default. You wont see a Windows generated boot menu.

As for partition magic though, I have not had any luck with it. Both myself and a good friend of mine both had our harddrives screwed over (ie. nothing recognisable, reformat job). So, while you can try this and if it works, good for you, you might just need to reinstall Windows again and during the initial parts of the setup, only give Windows a partition of say 50% of the total disk space (or however you want to allocate space between the two OSes).

Ok, it didnt work lol. Going to try this all again following that guide again. This time with win2k executive. I think it had a problem at first with my XP being from HP and it doing all its fun stuff. my first attempt at using the partition magic and 2k failed. I had both OS's installed but couldnt access the Windows. I have to find a way to get the partition of the 50mb in front of the windows install for the /boot thing. I think that was the problem as I had only one partition as swap and one as linux then windows.

Ug.. why do they have to make this difficult lol. I hope I get it this time around though, I think I understand that link you gave me a bit better now and partition magic is the only way of making partitions I know of. Apparently I'm not having the non readable error since it was able to read both drives last time.

Search around the forum here a bit. I did have a Dual boot post where i gave someone some more detailed instructions. I would find it for you but I am at work at the moment. I can have a look for you later if you havent found it first.

Personally, I dont have a 50Mb /boot partition before the windows partition (ie I didn't use that guide by the way for my current installation, but I have used it in the past with success). Look for the other post and you will find my setup. I will look later.

If i cannot find it I will post more detailed instructions.

hi Skuggi. if you still had your original setup there is a linux program called parted which can separate free space on a partition into a new partition while leaving the original intact. however, since you now have a fresh hard drive to work with my old setup was exactly what you want (i believe). i'm not sure what you use for partitioning but i use fdisk so this will be a little technical if you are using something like partition magic (although the steps will be exactly the same).
setup:
hda - primary drive with linux and windows installed
hdb - secondary drive for backup / sharing data between OS's / whatever...

so you will need 4 partitions on hda:
hda1: 50MB linux partition (type 83), mount point: /boot
hda2: 80GB WinXP partition (type 7 - assuming ntfs)
hda3: swap (type 82) - size depends on ram... lets say 1GB as an example
hda4: linux partition (83), mount point: / - the size here will depend on whats left on the drive, which will probably be around 30GB or so because you will never get 120GB from a 120GB drive.

install windows
install linux distro to hda4 and grub to the mbr with mount point /boot

you should now have a dual boot system. as for the problem with your second hard drive, you will need the ntfs module installed to see the drive since fedora disables ntfs by default. once installed mount with: mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb
the mount point can be whatever but that is what i use to share my files between my windows hard drive and my linux hard drive.

Ok, heres my dilema now.

I have Win2k on one partition 80GB it's still there I believe
I made a second partition after the Win2k thinking that the win2k boot loader would pick it up that way and it didnt but i installed linux on the second partition and the bootloader there instead of the MBR as it had said in that guide. Now I can boot into FC3 fine. But GRUB doesnt see the Win2K install. This is the closest I've gotten to it working without errors even when I followed that guide to the letter it caused problems. Any clue how I can just now get GRUB to see the Win2K partition which not being touched should work fine now.

Please do a search of the forum. There are plenty of posts that will talk about modifying the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Wish i had more time to explain.