Partitioning Hard Disk and Installing Linux

[sujita]

I am currently running Win 98 on a Celeron 533MHz.I would like to partition my hard disk to install Linux on one partition and Windows on the other.My hard disk is currently not partitioned.I would like to know what exactly I would have to do ,and what software I would require.I do not have DOS installed,only Windows-supported Dos.Kindly help.

[mikek147]

The first question would be, do you have any unpartitioned area on your disk? If you do, good. If not, you'll have to shrink your current Windows partition. If you need to resize your current Windows partition, you might try the Ranish Partition Manager at http://www.ranish.com.

If you have free space on your hard drive, use the partition manager that's part of the install of your particular Linux distro. You need at least 2 partitions, a swap partition, generally 2xram in size, and the / (root) partition. The install should guide you through this process. -mk

[jdorzweiler]

If you are completely new to Linux and partitioning, get Partition Magic from Powerquest (http://www.powerquest.com). But installing Linux, you will find to be a headache. If you are a newbie, I suggest downloading WinLinux 2000. You can install linux directly from Windows just like an application. Which means no partitioning. That web address is http://www.winlinux.net.

[sujita]

Thank you very much for replying.
My hard disk is 10GB of which I am presently using only less than 1GB.
I have used Linux before,but haven't tried installing it before.
I have another problem.At present the Device Manager shows a hardware conflict.This cannot be resolved using the Hardware Conflict troubleshooter.What do I do?Will it affect Linux installation?

[danns]

The device conflict problem depends on what the conflict is. What are the devices in conflict? If two devices are configured to use the same irq or io addresses through plug and play, there could be a problem. This should not effect the linux install in as much as one of the devices may not be configured or configurable until you do some manipulations.

For instance, if one of the devices in question is a NIC, perhaps you can change the setting with the manufacturers software.

For you problem in windows, you can try removing the device in conflict and rebooting windows. This may force windows to assign the device non-conflicting settings. The other option you have is to manually set the resources through device manager (although, sometimes Windows will not let you).

[rEw]

Hey, let me see if I can help you out. About a week ago, I was scratching my head with the same problem. Finally, I did it, and all by myself. I realized that postings didn't help, so I read up on it. I bought Red Hat Linux 6.2 and it came with a partitioning program called FIPS, but I forget which version it is. But I know it came with the Red Hat 6.2 distribution. I'm pretty sure you could do a search on the web and find the latest version somewhere. Anyhow, my HD is 8.4GB. I read something about the disk managment tool that the FAT32 file system uses to maintain disks over 2GB. It said that the tool could manage FAT32 file systems over the whole drive, not just a certain partition, or something like that. It also mentioned the tool not being able to work with a FAT32 partition over 2GB if the hard disk had more than one primary partition, and that's basically what FIPS will accomplish. It will set aside a second primary partition. To get my disk ready for the partition and installation, I ran the disk defragmenting program to move all my data to the beginning of the drive. Next, I followed the documentation of FIPS by making a bootable disk with fips.exe on it, rebooted my system and ran FIPS. Again, reading the documentation, I followed the prompts to repartition my drive. After shrinking my FAT32 partition to 2GB and making a second primary partition, with the rest of the disk, I ran the scan disk program to check the integrity of my FAT32 partition. Then, I checked out a few things, just to make sure that everything was running just fine. After that, I followed my instructions to install Linux, and just kindly pointed it to my new primary partition, and BAM! I have a dual booting machine. Just a quick note: before you repartition your HD, I would recommend getting all the information you can on your disk, just to make sure you have all the info that you need in order to partition it. Also, when partitioning, do not run any disk caching programs, because it might take the FIPS bits and process them into the cache, thus making gaps or pauses in the writing of the disk...hence, a corrupted hard drive. Good luck!

[sujita]

Thanks a lot..I got Linux Red Hat 6.2 too.And did get fips.exe.Haven't partitioned my HD yet,hopefully all goes well.Once again,thanks.

[sujita]

hi...thanks all for the replies..
I got another problem..I tried installing Linux from the CD-ROM.It boots alright,but it says xstartup failed and run another installation pgm which is similar in content to the one shown in the red hat installation guide,but different in look in that it is dos-like.no graphics.Why did this happen and will it cause any problems later?