Can't Install Red Hat

I get the following error messages(using the auto partition)


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Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.

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Could not allocate requested partition:

Partitioning failed. Could not allocate partitions as primary partitions.

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You have not defined a root partition(/) which is required for installation of Red Hat Linux to continue.

This can happen if there is not enough space on your hard drive(s) for the installation. You can choose a different automatic partitioning option, or click back to select manual partitioning.

You should do manual partitioning. It's not difficult. What is the drive like where you're trying to install? Does it already have Windows partitions on it that you need to keep around? Does it already have free space where you're planning to put your Linux partitions?

The second HD has a 30 GB FAT32 partition (files only, no OS), and the rest (50 GB or so) is free space. The first HD is NTFS, and has XP on it.

Manually partition the free space yourself then. RedHat has a graphical tool that you can use for manual partitioning so that you don't have to use fdisk. How you want to partition it is up to you, but the simplest way is to make three partitions.

Make one partition about 100MB, ext2 or ext3 filesystem (ext3 is the same as ext2, except that ext3 uses a journal, which will take up half your partition, since the /boot partition is so small; I'd use ext2, but that's just me), and mount point /boot.

Make one a swap partition, and make its size be between 1 and 2 times the amount of RAM you have. For example if you have 128 MB of RAM or less, I'd make a 2 x RAM size parition; if you have 256 MB RAM, I'd go with 384 MB or so swap; if you have more than that, I'd just go with a swap partition as big as your RAM size. It's all very subjective, this is just my opinion.

The final partition should take up the rest of the space available on the drive, mount point /, and the filesystem type should be ext3 or reiserfs (or XFS I guess). If there's an option to use reiserfs, that's what I'd pick, but again, that's just me. ext3 is fine too. ext2 isn't so fine, because you definitely want journaling for your main partition, so use ext3 or reiser.

Later it'll likely ask you where you want to install your boot loader. If you want to replace Windows XP's bootloader with grub or lilo, then you'll want to put your boot loader in the MBR on /dev/hda. If it gives you a choice between grub and lilo, I'd pick grub, but that's just me. You can add an entry to grub later to boot Windows, it's easy (RH will probably even do it for you). The other option is to use Windows' boot loader, and later add an entry to it to boot Linux. That's not quite so easy to do. If you want to do that you'll need to install grub or lilo into your boot partition on the second hard drive, I think, and then later you'll have to do a raw dump of the boot sector into a file, copy that file to your NTFS partition, and screw around with the XP boot loader to add an entry for Linux; this is a whole lot of trouble if you ask me, especially if you ever need to upgrade grub or lilo, but oh well.

That's all you should have to do to set up your drive.