Newbie Asks How Setup Partitions Dual Boot Install, Getting error when installing.

[natedak2k]

First - Thanks In Advance for the help!

Newbie here trying to install Red Hat Fedora dual boot with XPpro. First my system. Two 80G HDD's RAID'ed together, AMD64 Athlon, ASUS A8V MB. Currently 2 Partitions. C used for Win XP, D used for all my non-OS windows files.

I started by using partionmagic to creat new partitions on my HDD. In PM there is an option to install a dual boot OS. I used this and selected Linux as my new OS. It created a "linux" drive formated Ext3 I think it was, and a swap drive. 20G and 2G respectively. It created these partitions in between my C and D drives which are currently used by XP (NTFS).

PartitionMagic created the new partions and my system rebooted. I started my install of Red Hat Fedora and got to the point where it asks me if I want to automatically partition or use Druid. I've tried both options and get the following error

"An error has occurred - No Valid devices were found on which to create new file system. Please check your hardware for the cause of the problem."

I've tried creating the partitions as both Primary and Logical drives. I've tried creating them after my current "D" drive and between my "C" and "D" drive, and I've tried using the ext2 and ext3 format. Same error every time! Oh... I also tried just creating a bunch of "unallocated" space at the end of the drive too. Hoping that maybe I could creat partitions in that space using Druid during install. that didn't work either!

Anybody have any ideas on what the heck I'm doing wrong??? I really want to keep my current XP install intact.

Thanks for the Help!
Nate

[Jarhed7276]

Are your hard drives PATA or SATA? If they are SATA did you load the drivers for them?

[sr71000]

you need to load the raid drivers. I don't use linux though so i couldn't tell you how! sorry.

[izaic3]

Just make sure no matter what that you have backups of everything, before you go any further, etc. TRUST ME on this one (experience). Lol, I thought I'd be cool, and mess around with dual booting without backup, thought I'd risk it. Definitely not a good idea.

[natedak2k]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jarhed7276

Are your hard drives PATA or SATA? If they are SATA did you load the drivers for them?

They are "Promise 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI Disk Device" and that's about as much as I know... Although I'm pretty sure that they are not SATA OR PATA. Neither type sounds right...

I would assume the drivers are loaded? XP boots off them and I can see the drivers load during boot (before XP starts to load). Do I have to load another driver for the Linux partitions? If so, how would I go about doing that with the other drivers already loaded? Where would I get a driver for them that "linux" would support?

On the other note... I'm like you, I thought I'd just start screwing around without backing up! I like to live dangerously! LOL. Yeah, maybe I'd better do that before I mess around too much more! DOH!

Thanks.

[izaic3]

Lol, np that's exactly what I was thinking. I ended up not being able to boot into any os. All because a stupid mandrake disc was messed up (even though I used the check sums, downloaded it multiple times, etc). I ended up HAVING to use Knoppix for like a week. Knoppix is good to mess around with, but not for your only os (It's kinda hard not being able to save things to the hard drive). In the end, for some reason, mandrake would not connect to the internet, so I think after the huge hassle I went through, I'm definitely done with linux for a while. Oh, and afterwords, most of my files got restored fine (I took it in to get fixed), except like 2, and one of them was where I keep everything I write, create, use, etc. (Isaac's folder). Definitely not a good one to lose. Now it won't let me delete or access it, lol, whatever. So have fun, but back it all up.

[Jarhed7276]

I'm not familiar with Linux either but I found this in a Linux forum. Hope it helps.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/104687

Edit: In fact here is the whole search page. I didn't realize there are so many types of Linux:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...Device&spell=1

[Jarhed7276]

If you can't find your answer there come back. There are a lot of people here who know Linux well. Someone can help. Friday night is not the best time to get a quick answer.

[sr71000]

the only real problem you might create, besides deleting a windows partition by accident, would be to write a boot loader on the mbr of the harddrive, in which case, windows will not load. If that happens, just boot to your xp cd, on the first screen hit r, then type in fdisk /mbr and you should be all set .

[natedak2k]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jarhed7276

If you can't find your answer there come back. There are a lot of people here who know Linux well. Someone can help. Friday night is not the best time to get a quick answer.

Holy cow! Were those links in English? LOL! That didn't make a ton of sense to me, though I sensed that the answer to my question lies deep inside there somewhere! Appreciate the help though! I'm not in a big rush, I find that you can't rush these type of things... Gotta take it slow, take your time, figure it out, and learn it (with some coaching usually in my case).

So far what I'm gathering is that I need to load another set of RAID drivers that Linux recognizes? though that doesn't make a lot of sense either as the current RAID driver loads before Linux setup even starts? That being said. If I was to load another driver for Linux, how would the machine know which RAID driver to load dependant on which OS I was loading? I know that I would use GRUB or some other such thing as my bootloader, but wouldn't that occure after the initial boot sequence? Hmmmm... Questions Questions!

Is there a Linux School??? Haha. School? Who needs School?