partitioning my hard drive

[quest]

Hi guys. i need to partition my harddrive.
i'm currently running winxp and need to make room for red hat linux. i need about 5gb to be safe. but i really don't know very much about doing this.

as far as i know, i have 0 software to do it with.

so i need step by step help to partition it. i should be ok to install it once i've got the steps.

so please, if u could direct me to any free software needed (if i need software?) thanks guys!

 

[Silquee Smoove]

Get yourself a Win98 BootUp Disk and use FDISK to partition the hard drive or better yet go here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ and put that on a floppy and you're ready to go.

 

[DJBen]

Back everything up, format drive [it's good to clean up once in a while ], make partitions when XP asks you to. Set the size of the partitions to what you want, and you're good to go.

OR

Use a boot disk. Stick it in, get to the DOS Prompt. Type in FDISK. It'll give you a few options. It's all pretty clear, set up your partitions. Install XP on one, have another for all the files, and have another for redhat.

 

[Caveman]

Download 'partition magic'

http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/13/8/13-8-2.shtml

 

[Page]

Don't use red hat unless you have some linux experience already. you will be tearing your hair out. RH makes a great server, but for the love of god don't use it as a workstation.


Instead, start with Mandrake, Suse, gentoo, debian, or slackware. or something like that.

Also, messing with partitions is very dangerous. You could lose everything, so be prepared to take that risk.

The best bet is to start with a blank drive, then load winxp, and then load linux. If you load linux first, winxp will overwrite the linux boot menu when you install it and you will not have the choice to able to get into linux when the computer boots.

 

[OzzyBoy]

Use partition magic, you can use this in windows. Fdisk is so user unfriendly, make sure that you backup if use fdisk.

 

[squirrels]

I'm surprised Red Hat doesn't have a utility to repartition for you. I know Suse does.

Either way, when you start monkeying with the partition table, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble.

I just bought an extra drive.

 

[DJBen]

Originally posted by OzzyBoy
Use partition magic, you can use this in windows. Fdisk is so user unfriendly, make sure that you backup if use fdisk.

Something thats always amused me... some programmers start out and ask why they dont make it easier to program. Similarly, how can I install multiple operating systems, moving swapfiles to specialised drives, separating the OS from the saved/downloaded files etc

All I can say is if you dont know your ****, dont use it. Everyones trying to make it easier for the user to do this and do that and everyone expects maximum efficency. Truth is, the more you code in high level programming languages, the less efficent it gets.

I'm pretty sure it's a lot better to back up, format and partition the hard-drive with the old school method than have all your files swapped around and pissed about with by a program thats written in VB. [VB is an example, I'm not saying the program is actually written in VB ]

 

[Aztec]

Originally posted by Silquee Smoove
Get yourself a Win98 BootUp Disk and use FDISK to partition the hard drive or better yet go here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ and put that on a floppy and you're ready to go.

Does this also work for XP?

 

[meridian717]

I'd have to agree and say don't go with Red Hat unless you have a reason to. Instead, you might want to consider something along the lines of Fedora Core 3 (FC3). Go download it and burn the CDs, or a DVD. When you boot into the installer, it will partition your hard drive for you and install GRUB (a bootloader), it should pick up your XP installation as well, so you can dual boot.

 

[meridian717]

Just as a side note, you might want to go ahead and burn yourself a copy of the "Ultimate Boot CD", just as a precaution in case something gets horrible f'ed up and you need to salvage your Windows partition. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Get it, if it doesn't save your ass now it will sometime in the future.

 

[Silquee Smoove]

Originally posted by Aztec
Does this also work for XP?

In the case of FDISK, I've used it with a brand new HD that was about to have XP installed on it and it worked fine.

In the case of BootIT NG, I've used it to resize a partition once or twice, with no data loss. Field tested and proven.

 

[Vincent]

Windows XP has a really nice feature that allows you to partition your hard drive. Let me look and see if I can't find it again.