Newbie help part 2

[D. D. Brierton]

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 09:36 -0800, Charles Malespin wrote:

> I am trying to run a dual boot with XP and FC2.  I have read about the
> partition problem and went to the
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-
> May/msg00908.html site(among others) to get help.

Excellent -- that URL is the definitive guide.

> I havent done anything to my computer yet, still just a stock XP.  So
> when I burned the recovery CD
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/iso/
> from here and booted with it, it just says "missing OS".  Am I at the
> wrong site, missing something else, I dont know what is wrong.  Should
> I have done something before this?

No, you haven't done anything wrong. You haven't installed FC2 yet, and
standardly the Rescue CD is used to help with an existing installation
of Linux. The Rescue CD is correctly informing you that it can't find an
installation.

I can't remember exactly what the prompts that the Rescue CD gives you
are, but at some point after booting from it there should be an option
to skip searching for an existing installation and just go to a shell.
That is the option you want. When you have a shell, type the following
command:

fdisk -l /dev/hda

Then write down the output of that command on a piece of paper -- you
especially need to know the number of cylinders, heads and sectors
reported.

Now you can exit and restart your computer.

Does your exiting Windows partition fill the entire disk? If so you need
to use a utility to shrink the partition so the you can install FC2. I
can't remember now if the FC2 installation program is capable of doing
that for you but I think that it can't.

When you are ready to install FC2 boot from the first installation CD,
and at the first prompt type:

linux hda=C,H,S

replacing C with the number of cylinders, H with the number of heads and
S with number of sectors.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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