On Friday 11 April 2003 01:59, pete atkinson wrote:
On Tue, 2003-04-08 at 18:51, pete atkinson wrote:
All,
I have a manager at work who has expressed a desire to install 'Linux' on his home desktop pc.
He has Windows XP installed on his 'D:' drive and his 'C:' drive is bare.
its probably easier at this stage to reply to my own post, because the balance has shifted somewhat when all the good suggestions were proposed.
What we know as hda1 (his c:) used to be win98 and hda2 (d:\) is XP. hdb1-hdb5 are data drives e:\ thro to i:\
when the install was running through its routine, all partition space on both drives was full so it was asking to shtink one of the two partitions on hda
He is reluctant to reformat the c: (hda1) as it will shift all his drive letters down by a degree.. (will it ?). So he has agreed to re-arrange datawise his e-i: drives freeing a good 5gb (which I have suggested he uses fdisk to 'delete' He will then see if SuSE install will then identify the free space at the end of hdbx to install on.
I have done similar things, and yes, you can definetely use a free / empty partition on hdb for Linux, no matter which one (assuming you use not too old hardware). However when you install the standard partition proposal will not see it, it will probably propose to shrink Win98 or similar. Therefore you need to go into the "advanced" or "expert" partition setup, I forgot how the menu option was called, but it is the most "advanced" of the three. Make a plan before how you want to size the Linux partitions, as at this Menu option SuSE will not make any proposal about how to size "/swap" "/boot" and the root "/" etc. (I think I have seen discussions about this here recently, so check if you need more info.) You probably have used all your 4 main partitions already, so empty one of them, be it hdb 1 or hdb2 ..hdb 5, it does not matter, then create an extended partition there and fill it /swap, /boot, /, etc as logical partitions. HTH, Matt T.