Putting the initial Fedora 9 os on my partition.

[bmossberger]

Ok, here is the deal. I downloaded the "i386 install DVD" from the FedoraProject.org website. It is basically a zipped file with a bunch of zipped files inside of it. I understand that I can just "burn" this to a DVD and install it. Sounds simple. Unfortunately, I don't know what to unzip, what to burn or how to make the DVD bootable so that I can modify my boot settings and make it "BOOT" from the DVD so that I can run any of the various command line or graphical command suggestions I've been reading about. I'm really
discombobulated (like that?? i think i made it up..) at this point. I'm an admitted beginner at this. The last time I really used Linux (I have VMWARE running on my laptop) was in the late 80's when SCO Xenix made it's appearance. Any help for this aspiring Linux power user would be greatly appreciated. Thnks so much. Brent

[leigh123linux]

Moved to General support

[Jake]

You should have an iso. to use the iso, you will need an iso burner. you could try a nero trial, just for the time to get it burned or many of the other free image burners.

You do not extract the iso, you burn the iso, and if you burn it and you got a single file on the dvd, which still has the "iso" extension.. then you did it wrong.

Edit: this should do the trick.

http://www.ntfs.com/iso-burning.htm

[bmossberger]

Thanks Jake and Leigh,

I managed to burn the iso to a dvd, reboot and start the install. everything goes fine until i get to the partition part of the install. i have created 21GB of "free" space (as linux sees it) by "shrinking a windows partition". However, when I try to create a "/" root partition as ext3 in there I get an anaconda error saying something to the effect of "can't create partition...". I have tried the install using the text option as well as grahical and i have tried "force primary partition" also but nothing changes the error. Any ideas on where I go from here?

Thanks,
Brent

[stoat]

Hello bmossberger,

Don't be offended or insulted, but that sounds like you may be "out of primary partitions" in the partition table. People do that all the time (shrink a partition but already have four primary partitions). In other words, it's not enough to have space on the drive platters for a new partition, there has to be "room" in the partition table for a new partition also (there can only be four in there). If I guessed right about your situation, then you are now faced with the possibly hard decision to delete a partition and in its place create an extended partition which can then hold many more logical partitions. Fedora can happily exist entirely in logical partitions (mine do just fine that way). What is your partition layout at the moment?

P.S.: If I guessed wrongly and merely insulted you, I sincerely apologize.

[bmossberger]

I'm on my way out the door right now but i'll check when i get back or tmrw morning. Are you talking about what the partition table looks like to Windows (Vista) or the Linux install??? Thanks so much.

Brent

[stoat]

What does Vista say about it? Look in the Disk Management utility in Vista. It will clearly identify the primary and logical partitions. And in the graphic depiction of the drives and partitions, the primary partitions are color coded with a dark blue stripe, the logical partitions have a bright blue color stripe, and the extended partition enclosing the logical partitions is green.

Here is an example of XP's Disk Management utility which looks just like Vista's. Disk 1 has three primary partitions and one extended partition. But the extended partition has a bunch of logical partitions.

P.S.: The partition table of every hard drive actually exists in the master boot record of the drive (the very first 512-byte sector). The partition table part of the master boot record is only a mere 64-bytes long and contains basic information such as type, size, start, end, active flag, etc. Those 64 bytes have room for the information about four primary partitions or three primary partitions and one extended partition. The concept of an extended partition was invented by Microsoft and IBM years ago when it became evident that four partitions were not going to be enough. There is theoretically no limit on the number of logical partitions that can exist inside an extended partition. But there are practical limits. Windows systems use letters for partitions, and the total number of partitions is limited by the number of letters in the alphabet (sort of). Recent Fedora systems (since F7) are limited to a total of fifteen partitions by the libata driver code that is used for all drives since then. The partition table for the logical partitions is daisy-chained across the boot sectors of every logical partition. The boot sector of each logical partition contains partition table information about itself and the next logical partition. The very last logical partition has information about only itself, of course.