Re: Can't tell which hard drive to install Fedora 13 OS to.

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



allen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Does anyone
> know of a way to distinguish between the two, or can anyone help me
> through this process?

I know exactly what you are talking about. I have 2 identical hard drives, 
both 300GB, and the installer shows both as the same and asks which I would 
like to use to install to. At this point, there is no way to tell which drive 
is which. Definitely a conundrum, when you have information on one or both 
that you wish to preserve. Fortunately, despite this flaw, the anaconda 
installer is very safe.

What I do is that I simply pick the top one. Make sure you select the option, 
custom partition layout (other options could be dangerous, as they might 
write to the drives, destroying information) -- I think this was on the 
previous installer page, but could be on the next. Nothing will be written to 
the hard drive, so this is not dangerous.

Now, you will be presented with a menu of available partitions, including 
those on the drive you did not select (strange that you were asked to choose 
which drive, when you now see all partitions on all drives anyway). You will 
see the layout of all your drives and likely, the file systems of each, so 
you should be able to distinguish which partition is which and be able to 
choose the one you want to install to.

Select the partition you want to use as swap. If you have a swap drive 
already formatted, you don't need to reformat it. If you don't yet have any 
installations of linux, you can reformat the swap, but if you do have other 
installations of linux or fedora that use the swap, then you are better off 
not reformatting the swap, otherwise those already existing versions of linux 
will no longer be able to use the swap, due to the swap partition now having 
a new uuid -- you would have to tell the old systems the new swap uuid before 
they can use it again -- a big hassle that is easily avoided at this step.

Now, select the partition you want to use for fedora and tell it to format it 
as ext4 (or whatever you choose) and give it / mount point. I personally do 
not use a separate /boot or /home partition. I mount my data partition to 
/home/me/Documents later on, once I have a running system, that is, after 
installation and after the firstboot when I have logged in.

So, now you have chosen your partition to use as root (/) and told the 
installer to format only that partition. When you click ok or next, you will 
be shown which partitions are to be formatted, so you can be sure that no 
partitions containing data will be formatted. You can still go back or quit 
at this point. Once you say ok, the root partition will be created and there 
is no going back.

I hope this helps.


-- 
users mailing list
users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines


[Index of Archives]     [Current Fedora Users]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Yosemite News]     [Yosemite Photos]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]     [Fedora Docs]

  Powered by Linux