pman
Group: Members
Posts: 1
Joined: Sep. 2005 |
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Posted: Sep. 01 2005,06:20 |
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<Sorry about topic length but I just saw in posting abilities that html is not allowed and as a new user here I do not know if this refers to direct page links or other ways of html linking so a little too much space goes to describing how to get the stuff I needed.> This is my first post after a dual boot install on one really old laptop, it is running win95 just because I am so new to linux letting go of something, even as worthless as it is, was a little scary at first. As are all the warnings about messing up your harddrive so it doesn't boot. And yes this may seem like a mish mash of info that took a while to compile but it made partitioning seemless and easy even for me. So take into consideration I am only a step or two ahead of planning and partitioning. Make sure you read the disclaimer on starting up dsl about there is NO warranty as you get none from me either, just trying to lend a helping hand. I read your other post and know you say you want a dual boot system so this is how I was able to do it using a dos program to free up the space and then dsl to format it(after reading tons about partitioning but not much about how to scale down the only existing partition.) I had one fat-32 partition that took up the whole 2g hard drive(yes it is that old). After all the thorough walk-throughs I found on how to use fdisk in dos and yet none seemed to touch on how to change the size of the partitions I found one simple walkthrough that helped me alter the only existing partition to create some free space. Believe me the hard part is finding the easy info. I spent way too much time reading but it actually did payoff for me and hopefully reading this will do so for you. The application I used was ranish partition manager version 2.40 which you can find on their official site. I read that partition magic was somehow the best at performing the function of resizing a partition but it costs money to purchase and time to get so I cannot comment on it's capabilities. There is a how-to pdf that is so basic it seems that the genius lies in the simplicity but it gives you a step by step guide to doing a partition resizing so you will need a form of pdf reader. The how-to is called Dual Booting Linux Step by step and can be found on the same page of the Ranish site where you dowloaded version 2.40. This is a clear concise walkthrough on how to scale down the only existing partition that is usually present with Windows 9x (as I have another comp with Windows 98 and checked that there is no hard drive partitioning there either, I cannot speak for WinNT or ME or anything else). Then the step on what to do with the freespace created I took from a movie on a slackware install using cfdisk to take the newly free disk space and convert it into primary partitions (the movie is is a flash movie called slackmov.swf you can find it on slackstuff). This you can do on/with the live CD by runing xterminal present on the destop and typing(without quotes) this command, which was was taken from the dslwiki about hd-installs
"sudu su
cfdisk /dev/hda"
this should bring up the cfdisk menu where you can create and alter partitions as you need as well as set them to be swap or plain linux partitions using the type option (83 for a linux system and 82 for the swap file). In cfdisk you create a new partition or two using the free space and then assign them to be whatever number drive on the type of drive you have (ide=hda or scsi or other, mine happened to be hda) After freeing the space, creating and setting the partitions I don't believe you should have anymore problems with the install just remember to right down the number and type of the primary linux drive(hda2 or whichever) that is to have dsl put on it and what the number and type(hda3 or whichever). This is the extent I can help you without any feedback and since I am new to using linux and the steps involved in partitioning did strike fear into me I hope I have helped in a little way especially because in ranish you can undo most of what you just did(as can you in many other programs such as cfdisk as long as you don't actually write), so don't get too far ahead of yourself so that you cannot go back with esc. I hope this helps from the n00best n00b of dsl and linux. It is time for me to go somewhere with my run on sentences. Excuse all the bloat from this post also I am just happy to have gotten this far with all the crud I had to read.
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Toshiba Tecra 730CDT P150, 32Mb Ram, 2Gb Hard Drive
DSL 1.4
I=Newbie=U be nice.
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