[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Thanks for taking the time to help. This is how far along I am.
> The version is Redhat Linux 5.1, with a boot disk and 3 Cds.
> My OS is Win95, 2G primary hd, 11.5G secondary hd. 80M memory.
> I'm using System Commander, so multiple operating systems and
> partitioning is not a problem. However, when I get to the part of Disk Druid
> that asks for drive and directory, etc, it is confusing. I'm used to
> DOS lingo and I just can't seem to figure it out from the installation guide
> .
> When they start asking for "hda", drive, etc., I'm lost. I'm usually pretty
> good at figuring out this kind of stuff, but it's just not clicking.
>
>
Ok, Linux (unix) thinks of disks and any hardware device as a file.
When you get it installed look under /dev and you will find a "device
file" for just about anything you can imagine. You say you have two hard
drives, I'm assuming that win95 is on the primary drive. Do you have
anything on the secondary drive? 11.5 gig is pretty huge, don't think
you'll need all that but let's assume you use all of it for Linux. IDE
hard drives are named /dev/hda for the first drive and /dev/hdb for the
second (no such things as C: and D: drives or for that matter A: in
linux). So, in disk druid when it asks you where to put linux you'll put
it on /dev/hdb and mount it as "/" as your root partition. You can make
different partitions (and many people do) like splitting it up three
ways and putting /usr on one partition and /home on another, etc. But
let's keep it simple; make one linux partition and mount it as "/".
Now, let's say you only want to use part of your second drive. If you
have win95 stuff there already you can use fips (it should be on your cd
somewhere along with a HOWTO) to re-size your "fat" partition. There are
caveats about using fips with the latter versions of win95 but I don't
have it so I don't know. Ok, you've re-partitioned your disk, what
you'll have now is a smaller "fat" partition and the rest empty. When
you use disk druid you will want to put linux on /dev/hdb2. (/dev/hdb1
is the first partition with "fat") and mount it as "/".
Now you'll also need a swap partition and you create this in disk
druid. In the first example the swap will be /dev/hdb2 and in the second
example it will be /dev/hdb3 and a rule of thumb is to make it about the
size of your ram. Just remember the first disk will be /dev/hda with
your second as /dev/hdb and your partitions will be hdb1,hdb2 etc. If
you had scsi discs they would be /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. You'll
probably want to mount your win95 partition(s), you can do this by
making a directory called /dos or win95 or whatever and mounting that
disk there (/dev/hda). You can manually add this to your /etc/fstab file
to automatically mount it at boot time. (/etc/fstab is a list of things
to mount at boot time)
A word about "mounting"; any disk or partition is "mounted" under a
specific directory and you can be creative and change the defaults if
you want but, what is known as A: in dos will be mounted on /mnt/floppy.
Your cdrom will be mounted under /mnt/cdrom and these are not
automatically "mounted", you must issue a command;
"mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy", which will mount a floppy disk (it can be
a dos disk). My cdrom is ide so I mount my cdrom with;
"mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom". When you want to change disks you must
issue the command;
"umount /dev/whatever"
My point is, everything is a directory or a file in Linux. Things
can be automatically mounted at boot time (like your "/" will be). For
instance, I have another machine that doesn't have a cdrom, I just
"export" my cdrom via nfs from another machine and mount it under
/mnt/cdrom and it is transparant. Re-read your Redhat manual and there
are very good installation HOWTO's probably on your cd.
Good-Luck!
