Please help - Stuck with linux installation

[ganapat]

Hi,
I am tryin to install Mandrake linux 7.2 on my IBM Deskstar 30GB harddisk. I have encountered a few problems and I am not able to find a solution for that.

I started like this, First I installed windows 2000 on my primary partition. I allocated 4GB for Windows 2000. Next I installed Mandrake Which consisted of three partitions, One is a linux swap(256 MB Filesystem type SWAP), Second is a boot partition of 16MB(Type Primary Linux partition) and the third one is / 6GB (Type extended 0x85 partition).
I installed linux and everything went on fine. Then I start after rebooting and go to windows to allocate partitions from my available free space (ie 19 GB) on the hard disk, my windows disk manager would allow me to allocate only a primary partition from my 19Gb free space and when I do so the entire Master boot record is corrupted and I am not able to boot into any operating system. When I booted from a windows 98 boot floppy, it recognizes the 6GB linux partition as a extended DOS partition.

I went berserk on seeing this. Is this normal?? Right after this thing happened I went and browsed thru some documentation and saw that you could have only one extended partition in DOS. Alright I thought, But my machine runs windows 2000 and not DOS So why it would not allow me to define an extended partition on my free space. Add to my excitement, all the space that linux was there was showing as free space on my windows 2000 disk manager.

Could anyone explain to me what is happening.

The same thing happened sometime earlier at my friends place when I was trying to install linux on a 13GB hardisk that had windows 98 on the first 4Gb primary partition. I installed linux on the next 4Gb and when I booted to windows 98 to allocate the next 5Gb for windows extended partition it(FDISK) recognized the linux partition as extended and told me that extended partition already existed and would not allow me to do anything. Why is FDISK recognizing the linux partition as extended partition, when it should recognize it as non-Dos partition. Can anyone explain me the reason to this???

Also, when I did a recommended install, Mandrake 7.2 allocated the /boot and the /partition of 16MB and 6Gb respectively as extended linux partitions, is it normal for that to do like that. Can anyone explain me what type of partitions we have to allocate when we have a primary FAT32 partition. Should we do another primary for /boot or just an extended would help.

I have reformatted my harddisk 4 times and everytime the same thing happens. Please help me on this. This is driving me crazy.

Thanks
Rajkumar

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Rajkumar Ganapathy
Graduate Student
UTD

[milanuk]

Not sure what you're doing, but it sounds like you have the following (on the IBM 30GB):

4GB windows hda1
256M linux swap hda2
16M linux ext2 (/boot) hda3
6GB extended partition hda4
6GB linux ext2 or reiserfs (/) hda5
19GB free

I might be wrong here, but what I think is happening is you are creating a 4GB primary partition for Win2k, a 16MB primary partition for Linux /boot, a 256M primary partition for Linux swap, and a 6GB extended partition for Linux /. Unfortunately, this last partition also, if I understand partitioning correctly, takes up the fourth primary partition. So as far as fdisk is concerned, you already have maxxed out on partitions, and are trying to create more than four primary partitions, which is apparently causing problems.

Try this: Create your Win2k and linux /boot partitions as before, and then create an extended partition. Inside that, create your swap partition and / partitions as 'logical' partitions. That will leave you one primary partition left to put the 19GB on, or you could just allocate 25GB to the extended partition, and create whatever size partitions inside it you need, i.e. 256M swap, 6GB /, plus whatever else you want.

HTH,

Monte


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There are basically three kinds of men. There
are the ones who learn by reading. Then there are
the few who learn by observation. The rest just
have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

[mdwatts]

You are allowed a maximum of 4 primary partitions or 3 primary and 1 extended. The extended partition will count as one primary partition with multiple logical partitions within the extended.

Linux can be installed in a primary partition or a logical partition within the extended.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

This site may help you http://www.xperts.co.za/multiboot/
It's a fairly complete set of instructions on how to multiboot with any WIndows system and Linux.

Good luck.