Installing FC5 as a second OS.

[Reverend]

Okay. I have two hard drives, a 20 gig that I have my WinXP installed on and an 80 gig to kinda make up for the small 20 gig. I want to install FC5 on a partition on the 80 gig and have another partition to use sort of as 'data storage' to go along with both OSes (is that even possible?)

So, it'd look something like this:


_____________C Drive______________________________
|
| 20 gig - Windows HD
|_________________________________________________

___D partition______________E partition___________
| |
| FC5 | Installed games, data.
|______________|__________________________________


Before deciding to dive into FC5 and dual booting I used the 80 gig as a place to install video games (8 gigs of WoW, 4 gigs of Guild Wars, and a few more gigs of other games won't quite fit on the 20, obviously) and as a place for pictures and other data. The games won't run under FC5, I am aware of this, but as long as the partition is Fat32 I can still access the pictures and such from FC5, yes?

I went through and moved all my data to my fileserver and uninstalled all games and formatted the 80 gig... but now I'm kind of at a loss as to how to configure the partitions. Should I leave the D partition unallocated for FC5 and set up the E partition from within Windows as a logical partition? ... or?

[sentry]

I went through and moved all my data to my fileserver and uninstalled all games and formatted the 80 gig... but now I'm kind of at a loss as to how to configure the partitions. Should I leave the D partition unallocated for FC5 and set up the E partition from within Windows as a logical partition? ... or?

I would leave the D partition unformmated. During the install select the option to install Fedora on unpartitioned space. It'll be an easy install this way.

Good luck.

[Reverend]

I would leave the D partition unformmated. During the install select the option to install Fedora on unpartitioned space. It'll be an easy install this way.

So should I go ahead and set up the E partition then? If so, should it be a primary or an extended?

[sentry]

I think I would go with primary myself. Not really sure if it would matter all that much as long as you can mount it in fstab or via the mount command and I'm pretty sure you can mount both types, even logical partitions as well.

[tomcat]

It is irrelevant if you make primary or logical partitions. Both scenarios will work. But I would make an extra partition for your /home folder. In case you screw up the base system, your personal files will still be intact after a possible reinstall.

[stoat]

What sentry and tomcat said... plus some additional thoughts about your specific questions...

I want to install FC5 on a partition on the 80 gig and have another partition to use sort of as 'data storage' to go along with both OSes (is that even possible?)
It's not only possible, it's a great idea. However, a partition to be used for shared data storage between Linux and Windows should be a FAT32 partition. If it were NTFS, Linux can be configured to read from it but not reliably write to it (yet). Why not consider half of the extra space on your second drive for a FAT32 partition that can be RW'd by both Linux and Windows, and half for an NTFS partition that can store huge files from your XP system that FAT32 may not be able to handle (disk image backups, video files, etc.) Just a thought.

So should I go ahead and set up the E partition then? If so, should it be a primary or an extended?
Either way for both questions will be okay. 1) You can install Fedora on that first partition of your second drive whether the second partition is formatted or not. Fedora can be told to ignore it during the installation process. 2) As tomcat said, the second partition of your second drive can be primary or extended. Extended only means that it can be further subdivided into logical drives. Every hard drive is allowed up to four primary partitions or up to three primaries and one extended. Multiple primary partitions on one drive are only a problem (that I know of) for older Windows OSs which are not now on your machine.

BTW, stop thinking C,D,E about your drives and partitions. :) Think hda1, hdb1 and hdb2 instead. You're dealing with Linux now. Many setup problems are documented in this forum related to confusion about hard drives and partitions and where the GRUB bootloader went.

So get to work. I think you are on the right track.

[Reverend]

Okay, I've just finished my 3rd attempt at getting Fedora installed on my second hard drive. On the first attempt I created a second primary partition at the end of the drive and tried installing Fedora there. On the second attempt I tried it at the front of the drive, and on the third I killed the Fat32 partition and just tried installing Fedora on the whole thing just as a test. All three seemed to fail. The installation itself goes off without a hitch. After it completes and asks me to remove my DVD and reboot a scroll of text flashes across the screen just before reboot. It flashes by too fast for me to write any of it down, but what I do notice most is that there seems to be some sort of input/output error at dev/hda ... despite that I unchecked hda from being messed with during install, barring the master boot record for GRUB. After the reboot WinXP starts up. No GRUB OS select.

I thought, at first, that it was just a flub on my part in regards to putting grub on the MBR and tried one of the fix methods here on this forum, but in running the 'linux rescue' command and getting things mounted the input/output errors appears again.

So.. yeah. Any thoughts on this? I'm at a total loss.

[stoat]

Reverend,

I fear that forum experts may be needed in here soon. However, while waiting, try some of these basic things that have relieved a variety of problems for many people in this forum:

1. Make darn sure that you are working with a good installation dvd. Find and download sha1sum.exe. Use it in Windows to confirm your downloaded iso by comparing the result to the value in SHA1SUM from the same place that you downloaded your dvd iso. They must match exactly. Next, agree to the media check the next time you attempt to install Fedora.

2. Make sure your system BIOS is up-to-date. Go to your mainboard manufacturer's website and look up the current BIOS release. Download and flash the BIOS if it needs updating. BE VERY CAREFUL DOING THIS. MOST EXPERTS DISCOURAGE WILLY NILLY BIOS FLASHING. YOU MUST FEEL COMPLETEY COMFORTABLE ABOUT FLASHING YOUR BIOS AND BE CONVINCED IT IS WORTH DOING. (I do it all the time. All my boards are up-to-date whether I am having trouble or not.)

Try again. Otherwise... waiting for expert helpers with many posts. :)

[bob]

Well, since you can now do the installs blindfolded, try this way: http://www.fedorajim.homelinux.com/ A couple of benefits: First, you leave Windows entirely alone on it's own hard drive, while Fedora's sitting all by itself on it's own drive - neither one can really mess up the other. Second, even without grub working (which it SHOULD, by the way!), you can still go from one OS to the other by switching the hard drive boot order in the BIOS. Third (okay, I lied about the 'couple') - FedoraJim is now just 'Jim' on our Forum and is one of the Community Managers and may be able to jump in and bail you out if you have problems.

[Reverend]

Okay, as a continued note I ran the media check on that first install attempt and everything was fine. And I just verified the sha1sum stuff. They match.

[Reverend]

BIOS is up to date already, by the by.. and here are my system specs in case they're needed.

Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ(C) motherboard
AMD Sempron 2800+
1 gig of RAM
GeForce 5200

Seagate 20 gig HD (XP installation)
Western Digital 80 gig.

[tomcat]

If you get I/O errors on hda, my first guess is: it might be a DMA problem. What kind of harddisk (ATA/SATA) are you trying to install onto? What manufacturer specs exactly? I had this once on a lappy with another distribution that all partitions got killed instantly due to a kernel bug and I only got I/O errors once I rebooted. DMA timeouts were the first "hickup", before the drive-partitoning got completely messed up.

What you should do: Grab a harddisk diagnostics-tool from the manufacturers site and check the drive for structure errors with it (Most vendors have an iso image or a floppy programm available for download). If no errors are reported, it might well be a kernel bug. If errors are reported, the drive might be nearing death (unpleasant but this happens from time to time, even to new drives).

Also: download a live CD of any sort (Knoppix or Kanotix are good choices). Try to mount the partition where you installed fedora with it. (e.g. mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt ). If you are sucessfull, check the /var/log/messages and /var/log/dmesg files. What errors are reported there?

[Reverend]

Well, no disk errors on the Seagate, and no SMART warnings to speak of. I killed the partition again and rebuilt it for a new install attempt, so I'll g ahead and run another (who knows, I might get lucky) but if it just does the same thing again I'll try the live CD thing. I'll get back to ya in an hour two. Heh.

[Reverend]

OKay, got it reinstalled. Still the input/output errors flashing prior to the final reboot. Used an Ubuntu live CD to mount Fedora partition but ... heh ... I have no idea what to do from there to get to var/log/messages to check the errors.

[tomcat]

At the terminal, run
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdXX /mnt

replace hdXX with your Fedora root partition. once this is done, you can browse the files with e.g.

cat /mnt/var/log/messages | less

or open them e.g. with gedit (gedit /mnt/var/log/dmesg) as superuser or the like.