On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 21:40, anthony crage wrote: > I was a bit more confident when approaching the idea of installing fedora, > but after reading about... I'm a bit more unsure of my talent in relation to > being able to do this. So I'm trying to build a better understanding. > After the tech reformatted the HDD, he split our 45 gig HDD into 2 > partitions: a 30 gig and a 15. So, it registers as this in windows: > A:\ floppy > C:\ 30 gig partition > D:\ a second 6 gig HDD > E:\ 15 gig partition > F:\ cd-rw > G:\ cd-rom > > What I'd like to do is throw fedora onto the 15 gig and have it coexist (as > in, not harm) the windows 98 that is currently running on the C:\ drive (we > havn't upgraded to XP due to a lack of funds). That should be doable, and 15GB is more than enough room. I'm assuming that you have no important data in this partition. If you do, move it all to C: partition or the 6GB harddrive. > Not knowing as much dealing > with hardware as I should, I'm utterly confused what I am supposed to do. > Several bits about the BIOS only being able to see so much of the HDD and > such just left me confused and unconfident. This is usually not a problem with modern systems. You can probably install Linux just about anywhere and have it boot. > So in other words, how do I go > about this? Will I have any issues with how the HDD is split up? Looks OK to me. > Is there > anything I should worry about and watch out for? Anything I should learn > beforehand? I would suggest you read the installation documentation for Red Hat Linux 9 since it isn't yet published for Fedora. The operation should be very close to the same. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ Try to understand as much of this as you can before installing Fedora. For simplicity for your first install, I would try to convert the 15 GB partition to unformatted free space before starting the install. You can use fdisk in Windows 98 (DOS mode), or a tool such as Partition Magic or Acronis PartitionExpert (highly recommended.) If you can do that, you should be able to use the install Automatic Partitioning choice and let the install determine how to use this free space. Your goal should be to end up with a dual boot system where Fedora's Grub boot loader is installed in the Master Boot Record (MBR) with choices to boot Fedora or Windows 98. Unless you edit the name, Windows 98 will show up in the Grub menu as DOS, but it will be Windows 98 that boots. It is good to have a Windows 98 boot diskette around with a copy of fdisk on it so that if you screw things up, you can restore the Windows 98 boot loader to the MBR by booting to the diskette and then fdisk /mbr will restore single booting to Windows so you can try again. More details at this point will probably not be useful, so I suggest you get some more reading under your belt and then get the iso files from the internet after they are available later this week, burn them to CDs and give it a try. Hope this helps. Gerry
