Problems installing Linux
 

Morning, this is my first post and I'm trying to install Red Hat 9 on my PC at home. I am, however, having some fairly annoying issues with the whole process.

I currently run WinXP Pro with one primary partition running the OS and a much larger Logical Partition for Data (MP3's, videos etc.). So, on an 80GB Drive, I have it set up as follows:

part1 - "WINXP" - 20GB - Primary
part2 - Extended partition
part3 - "DATA" - 50GB - Logical

This leaves me 10GB of unpartitioned space at the end of the disk for Linux, this is currently set aside as unallocated space (i.e. it shows up as 10GB grey space at the end of the disk on Partition Magic and is not included in the extended parition.

Now, my question is as follows: What do I have to do to this space to get Red Hat to recognise it as free space and automatically set it up for Linux in the Installation process.

At the moment, the installation process tells me that I have not defined a root directory (/) or something along these lines.

If someone could post instructions for setting this up in Partition Magic (and in fairly simple terms!) that would be great.

Thanks

Not sure about how the redhat disk partitioner works but you should be able to just select the free space and click new partition or something then select / for it to be mounted on.
BTW you will also want to create a swap partition.

Ok. Let's use the Red Hat partition manager instead of Partition magic.

During installation, Red HAt will prompt you to specify the partition where to install. Here you can select the unused space, and partition it into two: One as root(/) with the ext3 filesystem(Linux has different filesystem from windows which is Fat32 or NTFS) and the other as swap.

Ideally, your swap partition should be twice the size of your physical ram. The / partition is where Linux would be installed.

Now, you are ready to install Red Hat. But, I believe that 10 GB would not be enough space if you want to run many GUI applications such as XMMS, Mplayer, OpenOffice, etc.

As a starting point and a full install of RedHat 10Gig will be plenty. A full install if I remember right is only like 2.5Gig.

Thanks for the help guys,

After a bit of scouting around on the net, I've decided to install Mandrake 10, which went like a dream, partioned my drive automatically and everything:)

So, I'm now enjoying Linux, but not Red Hat