Hi,

I'm a newbie so don't be too surprised by my question...

I pressed the "Auto allocate" button in the Mandrake 10.1 partitioning tool (XDrake?), just to see what it suggests, and it created 3 partitions in the unallocated 8GB at the end of my drive:

4.5GB ext3
mounted as: /

500MB swap

2.8GB ext3
mounted as: /home


2 questions:
1. Shouldn't I also mount a partition as /boot ?
Isn't it needed?

2. What about /usr ?
(I'm planing to use this installation as a server in a Linux network I'll build)

Thanks in advance!
Tom

Well, the tool is called diskdrake....


If you don't create those partitions by hand, they're created as a directory on the root partition. So auto allocate does no harm to your filesystem (ie. it's totally functional).

You are good to go with install.

Do you not have a bigger hard-drive? I would recommend installing a new hard-drive, at least 40G.

d-1

mwah,

if you know how to work with Linux, you can install MDK on 500meg .... (i've got 650gb so I'm not complaining) and use it as a router\webserver (for those purposes better to use debby though)

Well, shouldn't that be enough for a basic Linux/Linux Network services learning installation?

The thing is that for some reason LILO doesn't work.
(this computer is running WinXP too)

1.
I tried installing it to the root partition of this hard drive, and it shows its menu at boot, I select Linux, and the boot process hangs when it tries mounting the linux boot partition (it tries 2 failsafe options when the default mounting method fails, but those fail too).

2. I tried installing LILO to the Linux boot partition and then using bootpart.exe to add it to the WinXP boot menu, but when I select this option during boot it tells me it fails to load from the hard drive.

My system:
P4 3.2GHz (Northwood)
Asus P4P800 (bios 1016)
1GB RAM (2 x 512MB)
Adaptec 39160 controller
Seagate Baraccuda 7200.7 120GB 8MB buffer (Parallal ATA)
Seagate Baraccuda 7200.7 120GB 8MB buffer (Serial ATA)
Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 73GB

The Cheetah is my boot hard drive:
C: WinXP
D: WinXP
E: Win2k
F: General purpose drive (NTFS)
8GB of unallocated space for the Linux installation

The 2 x 120GB IDE drives are for general storage, both have a single FAT32 extended partition (a logical partition of course).


Apart from the limited space for the Linux installation, can you find any other possible reasons for Mandrake 10.1 problems with this system?

Thanks!!!

I've got some barracudas from seagate(adaptec controller too) and they just work fine : shoudn't be a problem.

Try booting from cd1 , and then press f1, and type rescue (which will reinstall LiLo). Does that work?

I remember enabling LILO to run from the boot.ini file prfectly with the following command:
# dd if=/dev/sda8 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

And then adding the following line to the boot.ini file:
C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="Mandrake Linux"


Of course I need to run this command from the Linux shell, but how can I boot my installed Linux now without a boot diskette (I found it very strange that Mandrake 10.1 didn't offer me to create a boot diskette at the end of the installation)?

I have the feeling this procedure will make the dual boot work, if only I could boot to my installed Mandrake...

Thanks!

There may be an option to Auto-allocate for a server installation. If not and you are doing things manually, the setup program will make a suggestion on what the next partition should be and the size, however, you might want to bump up the suggested /usr size a bit.

The Linux File System Hierarchy Standard ( see www.tldp.org for this document ) may be a good read to decide which partitions you need.