[wplug] install question

[Ingimarson, Darin]

Amy,

The drive selection takes place whne you perform the partitioning
of your drives. 

You will be presented with the option to have Red Hat partition
your drive for you, or do-it-yerself with Disk Druid or somesuch.

Since you are taking your old drive (the 13GB that used to contain
your system) and using that for your Linux volume chances are that
the automatic partitioning thingy will kick out that it cannot 
find free disk space upon which to out your system (I am assuming
that you have not wiped your old partition table from your old
drive). But don't panic.

Simply choose up one of the do-it-yerself partitionig options
(I usually use Disk Druid 'cause it's pretty) and set up the 
disk partitions on your 13GB drive yourself.

Your docs should explain how to identify which drive you are
modifying with the disk partitioning app, but I will explain
it briefly here. When you connected up your new drive, you
would have assigned it either as the Primary IDE drive (I am
assuming IDE based upon your stated capacities) or Secondary
based upon jumper settings or possibly cable position (if you
have a cable-selected drive ID). The primary IDE drive on IDE
channel 0 will usually be referred to in the software as 
/dev/hda and the secondary will be referred to as /dev/hd<b,c,etc>.

I say usually because I seem to remember setting a system up
for someone that had one of those IDE based Zip disk things 
in it where the zip disk was probed as /dev/hdb for some reason.

Anyway, you can verify which physical device you are working
on by looking at the capacities in the Disk Druid partitioning
tool.

>From this point you can allocate your root, swap and boot 
partitions as per the instructions in your printed docs.

I am not aware of cases where the Red Hat installer simply mowed
over the contents of a drive without asking at least once IF THIS
IS REALLY WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.

Good luck.

	-darin





> Hi all,
> I hope you will tollerate another pre-beginner question 
> without suffering 
> from too much annoyance!
> My Red Hat Linux 8 unleashed came in yesterday and I'm like a 
> little kid at 
> Christmas. I'm reading the "prepare to install" chapter, and 
> I've dredged up 
> all the old boxes and manuals from the various pieces of 
> hardware that make 
> up my computer. They surround me here on the floor as I take notes...
> I bought a new hard drive (40 GB) last week and transfered my 
> old system 
> onto it. What I want to do is nuke the old one (13GB - now 
> the D drive) and 
> install Linux on that. And that's one thing I'm not seeing in 
> the install 
> chapter (where they discuss the graphical text  interface and 
> the choices it 
> presents to you) in the sample install (from the book's CDs) 
> - where you 
> tell it which drive you want to install Linux on. I assume if 
> this never 
> comes up that it will default to my C drive and I'll lose my existing 
> system. That would, of course, make the day significantly less like 
> Christmas... (actually, have you met my family? no wait. 
> that's another 
> list!)
> Thanks for you time,
> Amy
>