[wplug] install question

[bgtrio at yahoo.com]

About the "C Drive"-

Amy, the convention of using a single letter to identify a drive or 
partition is a dos/windows-ism.  The Linux way of referring to drives is 
to identify them as "devices" (which means they are represented as a file 
in the /dev directory); and then the individual partitions on those drives 
are further represented as devices.

So typically the first hard drive in a system will be /dev/hda, the second 
one /dev/hdb, and so on.  There will often be several partitions on each 
drive, like a boot partition, a root partition, and a swap partition.  
These will be named hda1, hda2, hda3, etc. for the partitions on the first 
drive, hdb1, hdb2, etc. for the second drive, etc.

In a typical redhat install, probably the root partition is the one that 
will most closely resemble the C drive that you're used to.  On my system, 
/dev/hda2 happens to be my root partition and so that's where 39.5 
Gigabytes or so of my 40 Gigabyte hard drive are allotted.

There's a file on a running linux system called /etc/fstab.  The etc 
directory contains config information, and fstab stands for "File System 
TABle".  You can read the contents of this file and see all the different 
disk systems that are available to your system.  There's also a man page 
for it (type "man fstab" at the command line).

Finally, if you have a cdburner, on linux this will use a special protocol 
called scsi emulation.  It recognizes the burner as a normal drive (IDE 
format), but talks to it as if it were a SCSI format device.  This is a 
little more difficult to explain, but you may want to read up on it a 
little bit if you do have a burner.  Red Hat 8 will set it up for you 
automagically, but the device will probably be named something like 
/dev/scd0 rather than /dev/hdc.  If it's not a burner it will likely just 
be called /dev/hdc or something similar.

Hope that didn't make things even more confusing, perhaps it will help 
you to interpret the partitioning dialogs when installling...

Bryon


On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Ingimarson, Darin wrote:

> 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
> > 
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