Installing FC5, dual boot.

You click "partition manually with disk druid" or something similar.

No matter what it is this is what you need to do. I'll explain it in detail this time.

After you do that you will have the 20gig windows partition and the 130gig showing and under it 150gig of unpartitioned space.

Now, you want to create a new partition 30gig in size in ext3 filesystem. The /mnt should be "/"

Next, you make the swap partition twice the size of your physical RAM in SWAP filesystem with no /mnt at all.

Last partition, pretty much whatever is left over from the unpartitioned space will be this partition. You want to be it "vfat" filesystem with a /mnt of your choice like /storage, /mp3s, /music, whatever you want.

Now, you go into the properties of your 20gig windows partition, in there all you do is set the /mnt to "/winxp" make sure "leave unchanged" is selected or it will format that partition.

Next, you have the other storage partition you made while installing windows at 130gig. It should already be "vfat" filesystem so you just add the /mnt to whatever you want it to be like the other storage partition.

Now make sure this is all right because its going to create all these at once(much better than the windows partitioner huh?), nothing is final until you go past that screen.

After that i believe theres options for network settings and such, also there is one i think where you select which /mnt (mounts in linux are like the labels "C:" "D:") to install the mbr to. You want it to be on "/" which is the main directory. Instead of C: you have / and the other mounts are put into that directory.

I think your problem was before you didnt set a drive to "/" so the install was trying to install to nowhere pretty much....

But with that you should make it through the install fine.

This is exactly what I did.

I went into the windows setup. I had two drives showing. A and B. (Both SATA). In the windows partitioner, I pressed C and created the windows partition, 20Gb. Then I went and created another 130Gb partition on the same drive (A).

From there I went and made the final 110Gb partition on the second drive B. After I had created the partitions it looked something like this.

HDA

C: 20Gb Raw
D: 130Gb Raw

HDB
E: 110Gb Raw
Unpartitioned Space 45Gb.

So then I went ahead and installed windows on drive C: (the 20Gb partition on HDA). After install finished I went into windows. Went Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc > checked the partitions and what was available. It showed up exactly as was supposed to.

Disk 0 (this is A)
C: 20Gb (ntfs System) ........ D: 130Gb (RAW)

Disk 1 (this is B)
E: 110Gb (RAW) ..... Unallocated space 40Gb

then it also had my DVDRW drive and floppy drive.

So I did quick formats of the 2 storage partitions, making them both ntfs. So I could use them. After the quick formats completed I put in the FC5 disk and restarted.

Loaded the menu item where you press enter. Did that. Came up with do you want to check the disk for errors or whatever. I went skip, because I have done this before about 2 or 3 times and each time the check says the disk is fine.

From there it loads Anaconda. I choose language and location. Then I get to the disk partitioner. It has options to remove linux partitions and windows partitions etc. I chose to manually configure my partitions.

In there the disks showed up like this.

Disk 1
20Gb - ntfs - sectors xxx-xxx
130Gb - (didn't say any format, just said free so I was like wtf)
Disk 2
150Gb - (again free wtf?)

So I went ahead with my original plan. I was going to make a 38Gb partition for mount point " / " and then file system ext3. at first it kept making this partition out of the 130Gb free space. So I specified sectors from the second disk. I worked it out perfectly, 5098 sectors was 38Gb or something like that. And like 521 sectors were for 2Gb. So I made these partitions. The 2Gb being SWAP (I have 1Gb ram so therefore I made 2Gb as Swap as you said. No mount point, it greys it out anyway). I clicked next. It came up with information about Grub loader and which partition to boot from. In the list were:

Disk 1 (A)
Disk 2 (B) mount point " / "

I selected B as the default. I then also selected that it install GRUB loader onto B.

I then went on. Chose the appz and packages I wanted installed. Clicked next. It checked dependancies and continued. It came up with some message about how it was going to format and then install if I wanted to continue. So I chose next. From there it went on. The screen with progress bar and such came up. But nothing happened. I left it for approximately an hour. Came back and still no progress. So I did ctrl+alt+F2 and saw the text and errors. Took a pic with my camera, wasn't going to write it all down with a pen and paper. Then I went ctrl+alt+F3. same thing all the way back to the progress bar (up to F7).

I decided, 1 hour and no progress and some errors. This isn't going to work. Pushed reset and the computer restarted. Got to the loading windows sign with the sliding bar, flashed to a BSOD for about a split second and restarted, all the way back past where you press del to enter the bios, and did the same thing. I was like wtf.

So I went back into a windows install. The harddrives were listed as

Disk 1
Unknown partition (or something like that)
Disk 2
Unallocated space

I was like wtf. Deleted both partitions and reinstalled windows on another 20Gb partition. And here I am.

Yea, i made an asumption that NTFS support was out because there was alot of talk about it like a year ago. But it isn't. So you have to make all those drives your making NTFS FAT32 instead. Thats the problem, your trying to mount what its reading as unpartitioned space.

I feel bad now, i've wasted hours of your time thinking linux had NTFS support.....

I see. lol

So what I do is I create the partitions like this:

Disk A
20Gb - FAT32 windows
130Gb - FAT32

Disk B
110Gb - FAT32
38Gb - EXT3 - mnt point /
2Gb - SWAP


After I have done that the install should work? Then once installed I can convert the FAT32 drives to ntfs in cmd.exe under windows. So that I can have files over 3Gb or 4Gb or whatever it is. ???

no no no, NTFS is like a alien language to Linux. You saw how it read it as unpartitioned space right? It doesn't recognize that format at all. Keep them FAT32. Kind of like when you saw the drives when installing windows they said "unknown partition" because windows doesn't know what ext3 or swap are lol.

But yes that is correct, just make sure to mount them all except for the SWAP which you cant anyways.

See once you get it going on your desktop you'll have a icon that says "filesystem" which is like my computer, except you'll see all different folders in it with different names, no C, D or anything. Those mounts place a shortcut to that drive into the "/" or "filesystem" folder. So you can just open that and double click "winxp" and browse you windows partition.

Hope your next post comes from the FC5 GUI.

Yes. Both SATA drives are working perfectly. And yes, the windows partitioner does leave 8mb free.

I have looked at that guide before. But it didn't really help me. But I will check again. I'm on windows.

Did FC5 install correctly?

Linux can read NTFS just fine. It is Redhat/Fedora sucking up to MS and not including NTFS in their kernels. (Fedora sucks)

And you can set up Captive-NTFS to write to NTFS too.

So which Linux distro do you recommend?

Anything but Fedora? It is one of the buggiest mainstream distros out there..

Maybe try any of SuSE, Gentoo, (K/X)Ubuntu, Mandriva?

What's FreeBSD 6.0 like? Anyone used it? How does it compare to linux?

It's like... an Unix type OS? It compares to Linux just like any other non-Linux Unix type OS in the way that it's Unix, but slightly different?

Just try it. It has a different "feel" to it. FreeBSD is the most linuxish of all BSDs, but still, many things work differently.