Help me with Red Hat 8

[Doogee]

Help me...

When i get up to partitioning it says it can not read the partition table and it has to initialise the drive, erasing all data!!!

Is there anything i can do? could it be to do with me going over the first cluster or whatever it is??

[Doogee]

can i do it without killing the data? like re set the partition table but still have all my shit on it or something...

[voidmain]

1) What is the make/model of your drive (if you know) and it's size?
2) Are you using any special drive software like "disk manager" or "ontrack" etc?
3) You might try setting the drive to LBA mode in your BIOS.
4) I assume you get this message when you try and use Disk Druid? If so could you write down the *exact* words of the message and post them so I can do a little searching?

[Doogee]

1: not sure of make and model but its an IDE 20gig.
2: i have no idea what that is so my guess would be no.
3: Im pretty sure it already is.
4: Yeah when i get to partitioning i select partition with disk druid and nothing comes up it just said
"Could not read partition table of 'hda' this may be because you used another partition manager and it [stuffed it up]. To continue your drive will need to be initialised, erasing ALL DATA ON DISK, do you want to continue?


edit: typo fixing

[ November 25, 2002: Message edited by: -=Doogee=- ]

[voidmain]

You need to check for sure whether the BIOS is set to LBA mode on that drive. Also, have you already shrunk your Windows partition so there is free space on the drive to create more partitions? And if you boot the RedHat CD again, select "fdisk" rather than "Disk Druid" and do a "p" to list the partition table. I want to know what the geometry of your drive is (heads, sectors, cylinders, units) and how many partitions it shows if any, their type and the starting and ending cylinder. Then select "q" to quit without actually writing/changing anything.

[Doogee]

i looked in the bios and couldnt find anything to do with setting anything to lba. im just gonna backup my shit and do this initialise thing or whatever it is. im killing everything and am gonan make a small winders partition as hda1 and the rest as linux and swap.

PS : I got an error while unmounting my linux drive at reboot, where is this saved to? cos it went past to quick to read. i really think my hard drives on the way out.

[Doogee]

thanks X11, one more question

if i have a partition set up for windows but dont install windows straight away but just have linux on hda2 or whatever it would be, will i still be able to install windows on hda1 later?
Its to my knowledge that windows formats the MBR but if i reinstall the bootloader it would go without a hitch, right?

[ November 25, 2002: Message edited by: -=Doogee=- ]

[Calum]

yes, you can install windows after linux, and this is in fact necessary, since windows needs to be periodically installed to function while linux needs nothing of the sort.
the way to do this is to install windows, then after you've got bored of rebooting six hundred times to install your drivers, you get your linux bootdisk (which you made during your linux install), and boot from it. the machine will boot from the floppy, the floppy will find linux on hda2, and you'll be able to boot linux as normal.
If you like, you could leave it like this, if you have windoids that you want to be kept out of your linux side, but ideally, i'd say you should now login as root, and run: '/sbin/lilo' which will rewrite your lilo booting info onto the hard drive's MBR, and you'll get your normal lilo thing next time you boot your computer.

Aha! i just realised this is lilo specific so can anybody answer for what to do if GRUB was being used?
ta.

(i know i said i'd stop helping people, well, you can go ahead and insult me now).

[ November 25, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[Doogee]

okay so i make a bootdisk and when windows fucks my MBR i boot from the bootdisk and run whatever it is, ill be using grub as i have never used it and my mate had problems with lilo and red hat 8.

[Calum]

you got it, as you say, i don't know what you need to run if you're using GRUB, but it's not /sbin/lilo

[Nobber]

Doogee, if you're installing Windows 2000, it doesn't touch the MBR, so you don't need to worry about LILO or GRUB disappearing. Not sure what XP does.

[Calum]

what's windows 2000 do instead then?

[voidmain]

If you happen overwrite your MBR by installing Windows which causes the GRUB menu to disappear just boot from your Linux boot floppy (that you created while installing RedHat) and as root type "grub-install /dev/hda".

[Nobber]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
what's windows 2000 do instead then?

As far as I can tell, nuffink. When I installed Windows 2000 on a crisp new drive once upon a time, I was a little confused when nothing happened after the first reboot during installation. Problem: no boot loader! I had to pop in my Ranish Partition Manager disk, install a standard IPL into the MBR, and make the Windows partition active. After that, Bob was very much my uncle.

[Doogee]

bob may have been your uncle, but was fanny your aunt?