[wplug] Disk Partition Help

[Sean McCune]

Well, first off... are your C: D: and E: drive truly separate hard
drives, or are they just different partitions on one physical drive?

/dev/hda is the first physical hard drive in your system... the master
of the IDE0 controller.

/dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, etc... are all partitions on that first
physical hard drdive.
 
/dev/hdb is the second physical hard drive. And /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2,
etc are partitions on that drive.

/dev/hdc is the third physical hard drive... and so on...

But given that you're talking about things like /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda6,
I'm guessing that C: D: and E: are all partitions on one physical drive.

It sounds like you have too many partitions to make another bootable
partition on that drive.  But the thing to try would be to eliminate the
drive E: partition using Win2K.  Then that partition will be gone, and
you should see free space under Druid.  You still might have too many
partitions to be able to create a bootable one.

Your best bet might be to buy a second hard drive, and install it as the
master on IDE0, and move your original drive to the master on IDE1.
Then install linux on hda, which will be your new, empty hard drive. 
When the installation process installs GRUB, it will see your bootable
windows partitions on the other drive and include them in the boot up
menu.  You'd be able to partition and mount the 15 Gb free space on your
original hard drive as /usr or /var or something if you wanted...

Clear as mud, huh?

McC


On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 09:30, R. Lance Martin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am installing Red Hat Linux on a Dell Dimension running Windows 2000 pro. My C: and D: drives are essentially full, but my E: drive has about 15 GB of disk space. I intend to install Linux on this drive.
> 
> I am using the Red Hat disks that come with the O-Reilly "Learning Red Hat Linux" book. I am choosing a maual 
> parition strategy (with disk druid), but when I attempt to create my partitons in the paritions window, I run into problems:
> 	In the disk setup, /dev/hda2 seems to be broken up into /hda5 and /hda6 (16000 and 37000 MB respectivly). Unlike the example given in the guide, however, both of these drives are listed as Type NTFS/HPTS rather than "Free Space". When I try to create a new  partition, I enter the proper values (Mount Point, Filesystem Type, etc.) but I get an error "could not allocate the partitons as primary partitons"
> 
> Questions: 
> 1.Do I need to use a utility, such as fdisk, to partiton the E: drive prior to the Partiton window in the installation? (i.e. Do I need to create a chunk of free space on the drive before creating the mount points in the intallation?) How can I do this easily with Win 2000 - fdisk is not an option in the 2000 OS and I do not want to purchase Partiton Majic?
> 2. If the type is not "Free Space," is one unable to create the partition (specify the mount points)?
> 3. How can one tell which Windows filesystem (C:, D:, E:) is associated with each /hda (drive) in the installation window? In other words, I want to ensure that I am installing Linux on my E: drive, but in the installation I cannot determire which /hda refers to E:.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Lance
> 
> 
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