I have the new Alienware Area-51m 7700 laptop with winxp pro installed i have tried to run Debian-sarge, Fedora Core 3 and even Knoppix all unsuccessfully they all open upon boot but everytime they fail to recognize my hard drive. I prior to install partitioned my hard drive in ext2 format and i believe its just having driver issues because the controller is a promise fastrak 378, and the installer seems to see the controller but when it comes to setting up a partition it will not see the harddrive. HELP HELP HELP.

Lucky dog!!!

Try looking here for a solution. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=272365

Good luck!

-James

Thnx jfryman i read that thread a bit ago but i dont have enough knowledge of linux to be able to tinker with the kernel and i cant seem to load the drivers i got from promise being that this laptop lacks a floppy drive i tried using a jump drive with the drivers but never could figure out how to load from the jump drive after i got to the installation (i know how to load drivers before the install i just couldnt figure out where linux puts my jump drive after i installed the drivers for it) if anyone can tell me how to load from the device it might help me out alot thnx

Not sure how much this will help, but...

when you partitioned your hard drive for your XP/Linux dual boot setup, did you set aside enough space on the beginning of the hard drive (I think 1078?) for your boot sector? Linux might not install at all unless it boots from the beginning of the 'drive. Aside from that, best of luck to you. I never could get XP and Linux to live together on the same hard drive.

i have. here's what i did. first, fire up fdisk and wipe everything out

then, partition your drive as you see fit, but windows needs a primary partition - not necessarily at the beginning. personally, it has the last 6 gigs of my hard drive. now make filesystems on all your partitions, make sure you say mkfs.msdos -F 32 for your windows partition. also in fdisk, you'll need to set the system name of your windows partition. i forget the command for this, but it's right there in the fdisk help.

now go ahead and install linux on your ext3 partitions. you can mount the windows partition to /windows in the fstab if you'd like. after you've got a working linux install, put in the windows xp disc. it *should* not give you any guff and let you install to the partition you made eariler. in the windows install this should be labeled as c: .. hopefully it is. when windows asks you to overwrite the mbr, just let it do it.

now you won't be able to boot linux, but windows should boot. you just have to get grub installed on the hard drive. there are several ways of doing it. you'll need some recovery cd that you can get a root shell with. personally i used the gentoo cd, because it puts you at a shell right away.

once your in the shell, make directories for your linux partitions and mount them. then chroot into your root partition. now you should be able to run grub-install /dev/hda .. (make sure you have that program in your linux install before you install windows i guess)

now grub is installed, you should be able to boot into linux again, while windows sits there in oblivion. to get into windows, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this to the end

title Windows XP
map (hd0,0) (hd0,*)
map (hd0,*) (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,*)
chainloader +1

here, the * is the windows partition number minus 1. if you installed windows to the second primary partition, /dev/hda2, this would be 1.

hope that helps.

I don't think that's necessary. In the days when I used XP/Linux Dual Boot, it usually worked flawlessly, at least until 2.6 kernels came out. Then I had to do a little tweaking.

If you've got a disk with only XP, then you'll have to shrink the partition. Use a copy of ntfsresize (If you need a good util, grab a Knoppix Disk (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html). Fire up QTParted, and resize that sucker.

If you're running a 2.4.x Kernel, just run the installer... however most new distros use the new 2.6.x kernel. While in knoppix, run:

fdisk -l /dev/hd(x) [Where x is the partition of the drive, substitute sd(x) for SCSI/SATA drives)
You should see output like this.

Disk /dev/hda: 4325 MB, 4325529600 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 525 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
....

The important part to grab is the heads, sectors, and cylinders. (in this case 255,63,525)

From here, at the lilo or grub prompt (depending on your distro install), type in the command....
[bootcommand] hd(x)=525,255,63

where [bootcommand] is the command to start the installer (i.e.: linux, knoppix, rescue, etc....)
hd(x) = [cylinders,heads,sectors] the device used for installation. (again, substitute sd(x) for SCSI/SATA)

Then, any bootloader installed should play nicely with any existing partition.

-James