On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Jonathan Sprague wrote:
> [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
Well, IIRC ext2 can't handle filesystems over 4 gig, so you'll have to
partition.
> 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!
>
