Disk Druid? Where?
 

I just got my Pink Tie version 8.0 (read Redhat 8.0) and I can't figure out how to do anything. I would like to get disk druid to come up so I can make some space. I have spent most of the day at the Redhat site reading the manual and the more I read the more I don't know what to do.

Have you installed yet? If not put the cd in your cdrom and reboot. You'll see disk druid soon enough.

What exactly are you trying to do?

I'm not able to install it. I put the CD in and I hear it spinning around. I go to my computer and open that up, click on the penguin and get all the file on disk one. I have not found anything that tells me Linux is on my computer. I was under the impression that I needed to partition a place for it first.

You need to reboot the computer to start the installer (keep the CD in the CDROM drive). The motherboard BIOS must be set so the PC will boot from the CD first.

You are correct. Your windows is using the entire drive so you will need to create some free space. If you are using W2K or XP your windows partitions could be using NTFS. If so then you need Partition Magic to resize. Check the propeties under your c: drive to verify. There are several utilities that will resize a FAT32 paritition. There is some documentation in the utilities directory on the first directory.

I found when I started out with linux having a book I could refer to was extremely helpfull. There are probably several on Redhat at your local bookstore

I am running Windows98 and I'm using Fat32 file format. I was hoping to install this without having to buy a utility just for that. Things have been a little tight in the do-re-me department of late.

Dude, I think you had best read the installation guide at www.redhat.com

I have been to redhat.com and I did read the the install instructions. I don't understand half of it. All I know is that I need to make a partition on my HD so I can install it. I went to cnet and downloaded a boot loader utility and then went to the home site (osloader.com) to find out how to use it. Found out that I still needed to partition, but they had a freeware partitioning utility there for downloading. Both are in DOS (the only thing worse that windows), but there is a help group at yahoo run by the guy that wrote both programs. So, there may be hope for me yet.

You can check out fips. It's on your Redhat install disk. It's a tool for non-destructively splitting a windows partition. It isn't exactly real user friendly, but it is free.

I'm not trying to sound like a dink or discourage you, but you really should get a better idea of what your getting yourself into. If you don't understand half of the install instructions you are going to run into troubles. You may even pooch your windows system (I did the first time I installed linux). I wonder what you're planning to do with this osloader? Linux comes with two that you can choose from (lilo and grub) and sets them up for you.

I think once you get to the gui installer you will be fine, but you need to deal with where you're going to put linux first. You have a few options, in increasing complexity:
1: beg, borrow or steal another HDD
2: beg, borrow or steal a copy of partition magic
3: use fips

If there is another option I am sure someone will point it out.

good luck.

The other option is fdisk and do everything in DOS. How, I don't know, but I have two Windows manuals to study.

If you use fdisk your windows will be scrapped. fdisk can't non-destructively resize a partition.

It might be time to start out fresh. 98 is getting buggy and I have a lot of junk that should go. I was thinking of doing fdisk to decompress FAT32 so I could uninstall windows, then reinstall windows to get rid of the bugs. reinstall FAT32 (I have it on floppy), make my partition and install Linux and have everything fresh and nice. Ready for some happy computing.