Installing Red Hat 7.0 & Win2K On Same Drive

[beforewisdom]

Hi;

I am window user who would like to give linux a try.

I have a 3 year old Gateway G6-333. It is running a Pentium II 333mhz
processor, with 191 MB Ram, a 6 gig hard drive and Windows 98 second
edition. I have a cd rom drive that I can boot off of ( I stuck a red hat disk in, turned the thing
on and landed in the Red Hat Install program ).


I would like to wipe my hard drive clean, and partition it into 3 gigs and
3 gigs. I would like to put Windows 2000 with the NFTS file system on one
half and Red Hat Linux on the second half.

I am told that the tools that come with Red Hat can't deal with the NFTS
file system, so that I will have to partition the hard drive myself.

I am also told that Windows 2000 under nfts needs to be in the boot sector
of the hard drive so that I will need to find a way to make windows boot
linux.

Are both of these statements correct? Are there other problems with
putting windows 2000 and Red Hat on the same hard drive that I need to be
aware of?

What is the best way for me to proceed?

I know next to nothing about computer hardware or computer set up tasks.
I can read and I program for a living. If someone can point me to
something suitable for an ignorant, but an intelligent beginner that would
be cool.

I guess at the least I need to read something that will tell me how to
partition a hard drive with the resources I have.

Thanks in advance

Steve

[tallulah]

You can partition your hard drive really easily from the Windows 2000 installer. Make your NTFS partition. (I made a FAT32 partition of 600 MB right after so that I could transfer files back and forth between the two OS's, and it has been handy, and even necessary, on a couple of occasions.) Leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned, and you should be able to use your Red Hat install CD to partion the remaining space for Linux. Install W2K first. Then, you can install Red Hat, making sure to install LILO on the Linux partition mounted at /, NOT on the NTFS partion. Be sure to create a boot floppy, as you will not be able to get into Linux until you arrange a way to get a reference to Linux into the W2K bootloader! There are a couple of ways that I know of for doing this, but the easiest way I found was at this URL:

http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011.asp

Hope this helps. I don't really know if the hard drive you have is big enough to comfortably fit both OS's unless you choose lean installations.

:)

[beforewisdom]

Is windows 2000 signifcantly bigger then windows 98.

I have a 6 gig hard drive.

Windows 98, the software I use, & the software I don't use but keep around uses just under 2 gigs.

I'm thinking 3 gigs should be plenty for windows 2000.

3 gigs should be more then enough for linux shouldn't it?

[tallulah]

Actually, M$ says that you only need 2 GIG with 650 MB free space. I am not a good judge, I guess, since I tend to put a lot of really large Adobe and Macromedia programs on my machine.

:)

[ 29 July 2001: Message edited by: jane doe ]

[Stanley W. Rogouski]

Here's the way I would do it.

Get a copy of a utility called delpart.exe from www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com) and a Windows 98 emergency recovery disk.

Get what you want off the machine and boot with the windows disk. Do an fdisk/mbr, take the disk out, stick the disk you copied delpart onto and nuke the partitions.

Then format 3 megs of the drive as a Fat partition. Install Win2k with a FAT partion.

Stick in the Redhat 7.0 CD. Go through the installer. You can let Lilo have the MBR actually without a problem. The newer versions of Redhat will handle it. Install.

You should have your dual boot set up. Just hit tab when you get the Lilo prompt and you should get the choice of DOS or Linux. You can then convert the parition to NTFS (although be a bit careful about this since I don't quite remember if it will work. Play around. I know the dual boot works with FAT like this).

Originally posted by beforewisdom:
<STRONG>

I guess at the least I need to read something that will tell me how to
partition a hard drive with the resources I have.

Thanks in advance

Steve</STRONG>

[Stanley W. Rogouski]

You have enough space BTW. A workstation install of Redhat's a bit over a gig and Win2k server is a bit over a gig.

Uh, I guess you need a CD burner though.

[Silent Bob]

I have just done a dual boot install with win2k and RedHat Linux 7.1

If you have a bootable win2k CD the process is actually very easy.

Boot from the 2k CD and use the install program to delete all the partitions on your HD (Back stuff up before doing this).

Create a 3gig NTFS partition (again using the win2k installer)

Install to this partition which is necessarily at the start of the drive.

Congrats you now have win2k :)

Then put the redhat disc into your drive and boot from it. Go through the install process and choose disk partitioning with Disk Druid.
The NTFS partition with windows on it will show up as &lt;unknown&gt;, just leave it alone for the moment and partition the rest of the drive the way you want it for Linux.
When you are given the option for where to install LILO, let it install to the MBR.

When you boot up into Linux (you won't have a choice yet) log-on as root.
Type emacs-nox /etc/lilo.conf add the following to the file
other=/dev/hda1
label=Windows
Hold down Ctrl and press x then c. Say yes to save the file.

Now we are almost done. Type /sbin/lilo
You should see
Adding Linux*
Adding Windows

That's it you can now reboot your system and have a nice graphical boot option menu :)

[MandK_10]

JFYI
Redhat 7.0 is known to be a bit buggy. 7.1 is really a much better distro if you can get your hands on it.