Midnight in the Partition of Good and Evil

[Doomgaze]

Is there anything like partition magic that's, um, free?

[Burtsplurt]

I think Mandrake Linux has the option to change NTFS partition sizes (at least it says it does on the website but I was wary, so I used Partition Magic), but that means that you'd have to download Mandrake, install it, delete it, and then install RedHat. So, yeah, ignore that.

[Doomgaze]

No, Mandrake's resizer will delete the data on the partition, as far as I know. 8.1 does, at least.

[Peegee]

go the long way and use fdisk. You're going to be erasing your partitions anyway.

[Doomgaze]

meh, I don't feel like doing that now


downloading drivers and programs and all, yeah. that sucks.

What if I bought a small, cheap HD? Would it be possible to boot an OS off a secondary HD?

[crono_logical]

Yes, just install to that disk instead

[Citizen Bleys]

I've never had any other kind of setup.

You'd want at least 2 GB for RedHat 8, though. Preferably 5. Especially since you'll be able to read (with some work) but not write your NTFS partitions. So, basically, you can't download something in Linux and have it still be available when you go into 'doze, unless you create a fat32 partition for inter-OS sharing.

[Dr Unne]

I doubt you'll find an HD for sale less than 40GB nowadays. Two hard drives is the easiest way to dual-boot, yeah. Windows on the master drive, Linux on the slave drive, and put lilo or gub on the master boot record of your master drive to handle the booting.

[Doomgaze]

Installing a new HD isn't much of a hassle, is it? I mean, I really haven't installed anything more complex than a modem.

[Dr Unne]

No, you set the jumpers to indicate master or slave, plug in the IDE cable, plug in the power cord, screw it down and you're done.

[Citizen Bleys]

Setting the jumpers is easy, too...it's just a little plastic cap that connects two pins...It'll probably be shipped in the "master" configuration, but there will be a diagram somewhere on the hard drive itself that shows jumper settings, and it should confirm that the hard drive is detected on the POST, so you don't even have to load up an OS to check it.

Both your IDE channels are probably filled (One with a hard drive, and the other with a CD-RW in most cases), so you just trace the cable that your hard drive is hooked up to until you find another connector and plug that into the new hard drive, and then fasten the hard drive into one of the bays on your case (two screws will do it. The manufacturer will reccomend four, but as long as it's held in place, there's no need to take apart your whole case just to get at the other side of the hard drive bay. Most cases have something in the way). Most modern IDE cable is keyed so that you can't even install it backwards. (If it's not, remember red line to pin one)

Since you're installing RedHat, you don't even need to frig with partitions with fdisk; Just boot from the Red Hat CD, partition with Disk Druid. Start by making a swap partition of 1.5x your system memory (so if you have 512MB of RAM, create a 768MB swap partition), and then you can divvy up the rest of the space any way you want. For a beginner, you'll probably want to toss it all on one big partition, but I like to keep my /home, /var/www/html, and /usr/bin partitions separate, with a small (100 MB) /boot partition.

/home is where you would store all of your personal data files (i.e. mp3s)

/usr/bin/ is where most software is stored

/var/www/html/ is where stuff on your webserver would be. If you want to run a webserver. I usually do so that I can experiment with new versions of vBulletin as they come out

/var/www/html should be very, very small, since you're probably not going to be hosting any other web sites. On my setup, /usr/bin is always the biggest partition.

[Dr Unne]

If you have 512 MB RAM, you probably don't need that much swap. I've probably only touched 12 MB of swap total as long as my computer has existed.

I keep my DocumentRoot(s) in /home/*/public_html/. Matter of preference. I'd rather not give unprivelidged users write permissions on any folder other than their home dir. So I'd go with a /boot, a /, and maybe a /home if even that. But it's all a matter of preference.