F9: Creating partitions

Kevin J. Cummings cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Sun Jun 29 01:53:25 UTC 2008


Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> 
> Hmm... F9 is new to me...
> 
> 1) I am planning to partition a 750GB drive as follows:
>    a) /media/vista       50GB    ntfs  primary
>    b) /media/w2kpro      50GB    ntfs  primary
>    c) /boot              200MB   ext3  primary
>    d) -------------------------------- Extended
>        i)  /             200GB    ext3
>       ii)  /media/wapp1  100GB    ntfs
>      iii)  /media/fapp1  150GB    ext3
> 
> 
> 2) I downloaded F9 Gnome Live ISO and burned a CD,
>   booted up and started F9 installation.
> 
>   a) Selected "Custom Partition"
>   b) Tried to create "vista" nfts partition but
>      there is no ntfs selection available in the
>      'File System Type' dropdown list, all I see
>      is 'vfat'  So, at this point I selected vfat
>      and continued to partition to 50GB, primary.
>   c) Same with (b) above, but for w2kpro
>   d) Created /boot partition - but noticed that there
>      was a "switch" in the device - /boot became
>      /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sda3 as I would have
>      expected.  Why is that?  Don't I get to say
>      exactly what device I want partitioned and in
>      what order? Ignoring this, I continued anyway,
>      hoping this will not screw up boot access to
>      'vista' or 'w2kpro'. So, I continued on.
>   e) Now, to create the 'Extended partition'? - hmm,
>      there is no 'Extended' in 'File System Type'
>      dropdown list - so where is it?  What is 'efi'?
>      "Extended FIle system"?
> 
> Up to this point - I don't know what to do.  Should I
> choose 'Physical Volume (LVM)' instead and use this
> pathway instead of the way I am going as planned?
> 
> Please advise?

OK, here is what I would do.  First of all, I've never done an install 
from a LiveCD.  Nor have I ever done a Windows VISTA install.  (And its 
been 7 years since I've done a W3K install.)  *BUT*, that said, while 
running the Live CD:

1)  open a terminal window as root.
2)  use fdisk (or your favourite Linux partitioning tool) to create the
     partition table you want. fdisk can tell you what the various
     partition types are, and is certainly capable of creating the
     extended partition.
3)  use the fdisk "w" command to write out the partition table to the
     disk when you are done creating it.
4)  use the various mkfs commands to format the newly made partitions.
     I'm not sure if its on the Live CD or not, but my mkfs.ntfs program
     comes from the ntfsprogs RPM on F9.  So, the means to do what you
     what exists in the F9 repo, the question is whether or not its on
     the Live CD.  If worse comes to worse, you might have to wait until
     after you've installed Linux and installed the ntfsprogs RPM to make
     the ntfs filesystems.

** WARNING **

     Popular opinion is that if you are mixing Windows and Linux (in
     dual boot configurations) you should do all of the Windows
     installations before doing the Linux ones as Windows like to
     re-appropriate the MBR on the disk during the install.  The Windows
     FDISK program can reserve space for Linux partitions, and it is real
     easy to use the Linux fdisk program to change the type of a
     partition before you format it.

> Thanks-
> Dan

Good Luck!

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)




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