REQ: Newbie Qustion Hard Drives, etc... 1476

BTW, in the following, I'm a little confused as to how your disks are actually installed in your computer. It would help a lot to supply us with the output of the following commands:

fdisk -ldev-hdN

where "N" == a, b, c, and d. That will just list the parbreastion table, not touch it. If you don't have fdisk, try a "man -k fdisk" to see what you do have (cfdisk?). Then "man cfdisk" will tell you how to list them.

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Blowing away Windows is a good choice. I'd just use fdisk in RH9 and blow it away from there. As root in RH9:

fdiskdev-hda p

That should list the parbreastions. Now, type "m" for the list of commands. One of them's "remove" (r?). That'll ask you for the parbreastion number. Tell it "1", then "w" to write the ptn table and exit. Windows is now gone. You can now boot with the FC install disk, or skip down to where I describe creating ptns you can use with RH9. I'd suggest going with FC instead of RH9, buttuming FC is newer than RH9 (sorry, I don't use FC or RH so I don't know). Better would be Mepis or Ubuntu.

When the installer comes up with a list of drives to install into, tell it NOT to use the second drive. Use only the first drive (-dev-hda ?).

When it gets to installing a boot manager (grub, lilo), it may notice you also have RH9 installed and offer to add it to the list of bootable operating systems. Say yes.

You could, if you don't install FC on it.

fdiskdev-hda n # new

Now tell it the size you want. It'll first ask "primary" or "logical" parbreastion. Say primary. Then it asks for starting sector, tell it the beginning. Ending sector-size, say "+XM" or "+XG" where "X" == the number of MB or Gb you want it to use.

You may have up to four Primary parbreastions, or three Primary's and an "Extended" parbreastion. In an Extended ptn, you can have as many "Logical" ptns as you have space for.

Once you've made ptns:

mkfs -t ext2dev-hdaN

where "N" == the new parbreaston's number. You could choose "-t ext3" or "-t reiserfs" but I advise against exotic ptn types for personal machines.

To mount the ptn, create a directory for its mountpoint:

mkdirblah

Now:

mount -t ext2dev-hdaNblah

To preserve that across reboots and have it automatically mounted at boot, add it toetc-fstab.

Tell the FC-5 installer NOT to usedev-hdX where X == b, c, or d.

It's a lot simpler. Floppies are highly unreliable.

Personally, I'd go with another distro, but that's just me. I'd also get a Knoppix disk to use as a rescue disk. If FC installs but fails to boot, boot knoppix CD and fix it.

Another great tool is SystemRescueCD, available for both PC and Mac. That I know has fdisk on it since I just used it to reinstall Debian Sarge. I hate the parbreastion tool in the Debian installer and with SRCD, I don't have to use it. :-)

-- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.