FemmeFatale wrote: >Has anyone tried installing or had experience with RH 7.2? > >I have several partitions, thanks to Partition Magic 7. Great program. >However when I tried to install RH 7.2, I had a problem. > >Seems it will NOT install to anything but a primary partition. What >gives? > >My current drive looks like this: > >Windows FAT32 drive D: Primary Part. >Windows Extended Partion on same drive (physical drive): Primary >Linux Mandrake install on same drive again: Logical (/Root)Ext2, Reiser >Linux Mandrake install on same drive again: Logical (/Swap),Ext2 >Linux Mandrake install on same drive again: Logical (/Home?)Ext2, Reiser >Linux: Logical, soon to be I hoped the RH 7.2 partition, Ext2 > >Now, PM 7, sees those partitions as EXT2 partitions. And only 2 >partitions are Primary as you can see. The Fat32 partition is "Hidden" >as only one Primary may be visible to Windows 2k at once. The visible >one being the extended one *though I'd like to change that, I can't find >a way to do it yet, and make the Extended partition the hidden one*. > >Anyway, when I go to install RH2 it gives me an error saying it can't >install to anything but a Primary partition. Now, in the installer I've >tried to "force" a Primary partition, but no go. > >Any ideas??? > >Thx, >Femme > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? >Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com > Only 4 primary partitions per disk, and one of them has to be used as the root or container for extended partitions if you have any. That leaves 3.
BUT.... Partitions are the last 66 bytes of the first sector on the first track of the first cylinder of the disk. There are 4 16-byte fields which define the beginning CHS address, the number of blocks, the type, etc. If the type is extended, then the CHS points to a part of the disk where the software will read the first sector for two items--one is the real CHS and extent of the first extended partition and the second is a pointer to the next sector that is used for a definition of the next extended partition. It is ridiculous to have a stricture that the beginning / or /boot be primary... If you default install Mandrake, you get NO primaries, and LILO or GRUB still work. And we are still largely compatuble with RH, at least for rpms. Anyway, boot up Mandrake and go to Mandrake Control Center. Find "Mount Points" and start that up Now look at the disk. The ext2 partition you want to put RH on should be shown... clear it by deletion then click on the blank area and create a new partition and specify that it be primary. (That's under preference) Check in the window by clicking on the new partition and make sure it is one of hdx1-4. If not, and if there is actually room to make one, then open a terminal window, su to root, and make the partition with fdisk (VERY carefully and with thought). It may be that the extended partition has claimed all of the disk and you can resize it with fdisk non-destructively so its end is at the last of the last extended partition defined after you undefine the one you want to use for RH. PM is NOT capable of doing this. OK with the primary defined, install RH but CANCEL bootloader instalation or you may lose Mandrake. You can just make a boot floppy or you can do the following: 1. Make the RH partition mountable under Mandrake -- call the mount point /spare. You use diskdrake (the MCC "Mount Points") to do this. 2. Open two instances of Applications=>File Tools=>File Manager (Super User Mode)--point one at /spare/boot and the other at /boot 3. There will be a file called /spare/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-something and another called initrd.img-2.4.7-samesomething that you need to drag to /boot. Do that and close the file managers 4. Now Use Mandrake Control Center => Boot configuration. Add a new boot with vmlinuz-2.4.7-something as your image, the initrd you dragged over as your intird, and the root filesystem the /dev/hda4 or whatever primary you chose. That will work and will triple-boot W2K, Mandtrake, and RH A better way is to have a separate named /boot shared among your linux systems. Then those steps are unnecessary. /home can often effectively be shared among linux systems--all you have to watch for is making a user who has the same user and group number in every system. *the /home/username directory and all files within belong to that user by user and group number* Write and let us know how you fare. Civileme
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
