On Monday 10 Feb 2003 2:18 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Thanks to those who answered. I followed the instructions from > Lanman and Adolpho above, and got this far: > * I disconnected my 80G HDD - better safe than sorry.... LOL > * I fired up Partition Magic and resized the existing NTFS partition > down to 8G, and labelled it "windoze". > * I added another 8G partition, made it FAT32 [on a guess - I figured > if Linux couldn't see files on a NTFS partition it probably couldn't > install in one either:)], labelled it "linux" > * set the remaining 22G [I wonder where the other 2G went???] as FAT32 > and labelled it "archive". > > I fired up windows and moved my data from C: to E: [the newly created > archive partition]. So far so good - windoze sees all three partitions. > > Put in Mandrake 9.0 CD1, went through the languages, kbd/mouse, security > - accepted the defaults as they seemed reasonable. > "Setup Filesystems" shows a graphical representation something like this: > +---------+------------+---------------------------------------------+ > > | /mnt/nt | /mnt/win_c | /mnt/win_d | > > +---------+------------+---------------------------------------------+ > > This **looks** right, but it's not seeing the labels, and it **seems** > to be confused: what it calls win_c is actually E and what it calls win_d > is actually F [D: is the CDROM]. To be fair, it does say "just a guess" > in the details box when I click on each partition. > But: there doesn't seem to be any way [that I can see] to be sure. > And even if I was pretty sure that the second partition is the one to > put Linux on, I don't see any way on this screen to tell it to do that. > "Auto Allocate" says: "not enough space for auto-allocating" > The wizard gives three options: > - erase the entire disk > - use the free space on the windoze partition > - use the windoze partition for loopback > > I clicked on "toggle to expert mode" [with some trepidation, because > clearly I'm not - LOL] and found a button to format the partitions, > but I chickened out, because I can't be sure which partition is which. > And anyhow, the partitions are already formatted FAT32 - do they > need to be formatted again to put Linux on them? > I guess I'm looking for some button that says "install here"... > > ...asking too much? <g>
I'm not happy about what I've read here. I have had big big problems caused by installing linux between two windows partitions. My solution would be to install windows on the first 8G partition, create the big data partition next to it, and install linux on the last 8G of the drive. I think it would be much safer. You don't need to create a partition there - if you specify the manual partitioning at install you can install it to the free space, but if you need it to it can also install it in place of an existing partition. I would seriously recommend using windows fdisk or Partition Manager or whatever you prefer to make those first two partitions, simply leaving 8G unused. Anne -- Registered Linux User No.293302
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