Installation Help Needed - FDISK, BOOT, DUAL-BOOT...

bn_me · n00b Joined: 12 May 2002 Posts: 5

I've been trying to install Gentoo Linux, but always seem to get stuck right smack at the front...

I've been using Windows for quite a while, and just tried out Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2, and RedHat 7.2...

They were insufficient for my needs, usually filled with bugs or just slow, and not much control over the OS itself...

So, going from an easy as hell installation to Gentoo... I was smack in the face, and now I have a few questions I need to ask, as the first installation attempt failed.

Here is my system:

AMD Athlon 1.2 @ 1.4
MSI K7T266PRO + RAID
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40GB
GF2 MX400
Linksys NIC
SMC NIC (Internet Connection)

I installed Windows XP on my hard drive first, leaving room left for Linux...

What would the labels for each partition be?

The Windows Partition, boot partition, swap, and /.

How would I create a boot partition, for the kernel, when XP is already installed?

Would I encounter any problems with my NICS?

And, are there any bugs I should worry about during installation?

handsomepete

bn_me · n00b Joined: 12 May 2002 Posts: 5

What I meant by label, was in Linux...

In Mandrake, my Windows partition (or when I wanted to mount it), was hde1 or hda1.

Will this be the same for Gentoo?

handsomepete · Posted: Sun May 12, 2002 3:25 pm Post subject:

It should be the same as whatever it was in mandrake. Depending on what sequence the raid/ide channels are read, if your hard drive is on the first ide channel it'll be called /dev/hda (or /dev/hde) (and if Windows is on the first partition it will be /dev/hda1 (or /dev/hde1)).

FINITE · Guru Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 449

When you run fdisk in the gentoo install if you hit p and then enter you will get a list of the paritions that are on the hard drive you ran fdisk for. For instance I have 2000 (one of its paritions anyways) on a small 4gig partition on a 20 gig drive. That parition shows up as an NTFS parition with a hex code of 7 I think. So from there I simply hit n to create a new primary parition which will be the boot partition for Gentoo. Now since this version of fdisk only shows blocks and cylinders it was a little bit hard for me to decide what the sizes should bee. So I decide since I didn't know for sure what the sizes were to make my boot patition 100blocks and then created my swap parition again by hitting n made it a primary and made it 100blocks big too (or was it sectors, whatever the default is in fdisk was the measurement being used). Then I created another primary for / which used the rest of the dirve. If you hit m and then enter when in fdisk you will get a help menu in the menu it tells you it you hit t you can change the type of parition. So I hit t and then chose parition 3 which was the swap and labled it with a hex code of 32 designating it as the swap file. I then found the option to "toggle a bootable flag" and made parition 2 a bootable parition along with the NTFS partition. This may have been a mistake though but I thought since it was the boot partition for Gentoo that it needed the bootable flag. It took a little getting used to, mainly the method of showing the size of the partition (im used to mb, or kb's), but its really not to hard to get everything set up, parition wise anyways