Red Hat Partitionless Install

[AntiFox]

I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with Red Hat's partitionless install, but it doesn't seem to work right. I have 2 partitions on my machine, the first one os a 20 gig FAT32 partition which I have Windows 98 Second Edition on, and the second is a 10 gig FAT32 partition, which I want to install Red Hat. From what it says in the book, I need the second partition to be use the FAT filesystem. So, when I try to install it on the FAT32 partition it just freezes up while formatting it. I have installed it this way before, but am not sure if it was a FAT or a FAT32 partition. If it is the fact that its a FAT32 partition, how would I go about converting it to a FAT partition. I use Partition Magic 5, but it won't let me convert it to a FAT partition.

[AntiFox]

can anyone help? http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/frown.gif

[mdwatts]

What version of Redhat? I'm not familiar with the partitionless install. Since you have the space available, why not use PM5, delete the partition and recreate as ext2 with a swap partition.

The reason I ask the version of RH, is that the olders versions will not have the newer lilo and you will have problems booting past the 1024 cylinder limit (around 8GB).

Now if it is a partitionless install, would it not mean that it installs into a partition that already has an os installed?

I've never used Redhat, so am not familiar with this option. Anything on the RH website?

[AntiFox]

I have Red Hat 6.2 professional.

could you explain alittle more on using Partition Magic 5 to set up the install. Do I just use it to wipe that partition, then create a swap partition about 256 (that the size of my RAM) then make another partition that takes up the rest of the drive? Then enter the Red hat install and make it install on those two partitions? If so, how do I enable it to boot since its after the 1024'th cylinder? if you could help me out that would be great, because I haven't had the best of luck in the past with installing it (I have destroyed my hard drive once, and messed up my master boot record twice).

[mdwatts]

PM5 cannot convert from (V)FAT to ext2, so you need to delete the partition and recreate along with the swap partition.

To boot past the 1024 point, you will need to either upgrade lilo to the latest version, use a boot disk to start linux or use loadlin.

I use eDesktop that has grub as it's bootloader and have never used lilo or loadlin. Try to repartition the drive and attempt the install. Bear in mind that if you install lilo in the MBR, you will not be able to boot windows unless you update /etc/lilo.conf and put in an entry to boot windows. With the older version of lilo, you will have a hard time doing this unless you update the version.

Since you have PM5, then you must have BootMagic. Install lilo in the linux root partition (not MBR) and install BootMagic in windows, setup BM to boot both os. Now you may need to boot with PM5 after the linux install to reset the active partition back to windows to allow the install of BM and the configuration to boot the 2 os.

Read the NHF's here on lilo, loadlin, multiboot and whatever else you can find before you start.