Hi folks,

I have windows 2000 and Redhat linux installed in my system. I am able to acess both linux and windows via grub bootloader.

My hardisk partitions are like this at the moment (as seen by the Mandrake partition program)

Primary Harddrive

hda1 (C - 6.8 GB Fat32 used by windows
hda5 (D - 5.8 GB NTFS used by windows
hda6 (E - 5.9 GB NTFS used by windows

Secondary Harddrive

hdb1 (C - 29 GB NTFS used by windows
hdb3 (D - 29 GB FAT16 used by windows
hdb6 - 101 MB boot paritition (linux)
hdb5 - 28 GB ext3 partition (linux)
hdb4 (E - NTFS used by windows
hdb7 - 1018 MB Swap Partition (linux)


I tried to install Mandrake on top of this and it was detecting my linux partition and allows me to use the option (use exisiting paritions), and on the next screen also shows "/boot" and "/" on the selection wizard. How ever when i proceed to the next screen.

It shows an error message " unable to mount hdb3:win_d2 /mnt/mnt"

sorry the text in quote is not what it showed exactly but this is all i could remember. if you guys think the exact error message would help i will retry and post the exact error message.

Should i repartition exisiting linux partitions to make way for the new distro ? what should i do to over come this error ?
Please help.


Thanks
kris

okay, let me rephrase my question ?. It is pretty much similar to asking can i have multiple distros in the same partition ?.

I think the answer is no. In that case do i have to repartion my existing linux partitions using another utility like fdisk from the redhat distro rescue disk ?. Or use the mandrake installer to do its own stuff and rearrange the paritions there. I do not mind loosing anything on my

dev/hdb5 , hdb6 and hdb7 as i installed redhat recently on that.

I even tried formatting partitions hd5 and hd6 from my Mandrake installer. It still comes back with this exact same error message:

An error occured
mounting partition /dev/hdb3 in directory /mnt/mnt/
win_d2 failed (Invalid argument)

why is it trying to mount dev/hdb3 is there a way around this ?. I have deleted dev/hdb6 and dev/hdb7 and rebooting, will let you guys know what happens.

But why is it not letting me unmount or delete dev/hdb5 ?

Any pointers in the right directions will be appreciated. I am tired of searching all the forums for an answer. It is very confusing .......after reading through everything.


thanks
kris

not in the same partition AFAIK, but if your /home /boot and / are their own partition, simply make another root (/) partition for your new kernel.

john,

Thanks for your reply. I do not have any un partitioned space to create another \ partition. How do i do it with out deleting the existing parititions ?. btw what is AFAIK ??

thanks
kris

Wow that's a hell of a lot of window's partitions!

Perhap's you could either loose one of them or sacrifice some of the space and reduce them?

Don't know if that's possible with Mandrakes partitioning tool, but a "doddle", with Partition Magic (I use version #8).

and I suspect that the scuzzman meant "as far as I know" (AFAIK).

regards

John

Hello,

Make sure that the /boot partition should be within the first 1024 sectors and a primary partition for it to be bootable. The way to do it is, move the first windows partition to leave about 100 MB (can be smaller but it is a good idea to have around 100MB) from the beginning of HD for /boot. Once this is done, you can have other partitions whatever way you want. Also, you have to set aside space for swap partition. It is a good idea to have around 2-3 times your RAM size as swap.

Also, it is a good idea to have these partitions apart from / -
/home
/var
/usr
swap

BTW - you would have to use partition magic to move the windows partition in the initial part. Don´t think MDK or linux installation tool can move partitions and am not sure about any other freeware tool that does this.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Senthil

Thanks senthil,

This is the structure of my secondary hard drive now.


disk 1

Part 1 - 29 GB NTFS Winxp
Part 2 - 29 GB Unassigned
Part3 - 29 GB NTFS Windows shared
Part4 - 29 GB NTFS Windows shared

According to your suggestion i need to move Part1 away from the first 100 MB and keep that space for the /boot right. I could do this with the RedHat installation coz some how it is managing to create a /boot and load linux there.

If i can do that , then i should be able to load MDK or any other distro on the same /boot is that right / is that a no no.
iam not clear about that.

Next is i tried loading the PM 8.0 on my system and could'nt , during installation is stops saying you have windows NT/2000/. net server. I thought PM 8.0 is for OS windows 2000 / Win xp, so i do not understand why it is'nt loading in my environment. I am planning on creating a bootable CD and get the PM 8.0 boot from there, let me know if there is any other way of getting P.M loaded to make the partition adjustments.

Once again thanks to all of you who answered my question.

New linux user, will become a pro one day :-)

Kris

Here is my problem , i figured it out and want to share it with you guys what i did to solve it finally.

Like you said mandrake should take care of mounting my windows paritions after the installation, ok this is what was happening. I choose the use free space option for partitioning and madrake happily divides them to / and /swap if i used auto allocate and simple under the expertuser menu. Now when i click next it tries to create /mnt/win_c2 , /mnt/win_d2 etc for all the windows partitions that i have, here is where the problem starts. As i explained in my previous email the very first partition on my secondary drive labeled hdb3 was not showing up as NTFS by diskdrake. I tried other utilities to view my partition table and each one was showing a slightly different information.

Finally i used qy_parted utility from the systemrescuecd to view my paritions and i saw that there were two hidden partitions the first hidden partition ended at the same byte where my hdb3 started (overlapped). This was the cause for the error message i noticed during the partitioning step.


"mounting partition /dev/hdb3 in directory /mnt/mnt/
win_d2 failed (Invalid argument) "


I do not know what diskdrake was trying to do here, mounting my ntfs partition or creating filesystem to mount later ?.

What i did to solve the issue is used fdisk command from the rescue mode and updated the partition type of hdb3 from FAT16 to NTFS in the partition table, and ran the install again , everything went smooth this time around.

I havent figured a way to get rid of the overlap, i think i will get to it when i install another distro, but for now i got to concentrate on working with the two distro's i got loaded.

" From my experience with the installation, I guess it is better to use some utility to partition as per your requirements before you load the installation disk, if you had multiple partitions and too many NTFS parititions scattered all over the disk"

Thanks
kris

Just wanted to say thank you very much for posting your solution. I was having the same problem in that the Mandrake install was detecting my NTFS partition at FAT16 and was therefore giving me an error when it tried to mount it. I am going to try what you did now with fdisk. Thanks again.