Ok heres my situation. Im considering installing Redhat 7.2 on my current FAT32 Win2k System. I defragged the HD all up so im ready to partition it. But how? If you look in the RedHat Documentation is says to use some program called FPIB, to create a blank partition, then use Disk Druid (the RH installation partition manager) to DELETE THAT BLANK PARTITION AND LET IT HANDLE ITSELF!?!?!?!?! HOW VAGUE CAN THE DOCUMENTATION GET ??? RRGGHH. I want to make sure the installation will be fool-proof before i proceed. So please help me and tell me exactly how i should go about this. Again i have a 40 GB with FAT32 Win2k on the whole thing. I want to partition the 40 GB, put Redhat 7.2 on that, and oh yeah use the Win2k loader. If i am going to do this please help. Thank for your time Scottish-ness P.S I am knowledgable in Win2k but not in Linux. Please help an extreme Newbie.

When partitioning for linux in order to dual boot there are a few things to look out for. First off, to install linux you need 2 partitions at least. 1 is an ext partition and this is to hold basically all of your files for linux. The other partition is a linux swap partition. as a general rule of thumb, make this twice as large as the amount of ram in your system. This is just a rough estimate. Alright, now in order to dual boot there are a couple more things you need to look out for. First off, if your partition is not within the first 2 GB of your disk, then it wont boot. It just has to start within the first 2 Gigs, not lie entirely. The nice thing about linux, is it has the /boot separate from everything else. If you create 1 partition that is large enough for it and put it in front of your win2k partition, you can put /boot there and boot linux, but then put the remainder after it so you will also be able to boot win2k. Anyway, this would require you moving your win2k partition back some which can be a pain. Anyway, this is what I would do in your situation. As for partitioning your drive, you can partition it using any partitioning software you like. fdisk is the old school software thats been packaged with windows since 95 or earlier. Anyway, it is available on all boot disks and can be run from dos. It is a little tough to use, but there are howto's in the computing.net howto section. A recently popular partition program is partition magic. It is a little more expensive, but it has a GUI that runs from inside of windows so it is easier to work with for newbies. Anyway, this is just a general breakdown and for more information mail me when you repost. hth -Ryan

Thank for the post, i appreciate the time, but 1 last question, will Partition MAgic actually MOVE part of my Win2k over to make room for the /boot section of linux ?

Hi, I installed linux and Win2k on my 20GB.The Partitions were 5*5*10 GB. First and second 5 GBs were used for Win2k. The 10 Gb was for Linux. Everything ran fine.Dual booting was done. BUT, one day while I was working on Linux, something was changed by me unknowingly and the next time I rebooted, the system flashed "entering run level 7..No more processes left in this level." and the system got stuck. I reformatted the disk. But now a problem has occured. When I install Linux after installing Linux(Red Hat 7), on partitioning with Disk Druid, a message flashes: "Partition /boot > 1024 cylinders" and the allocation is unsuccessful. Help me.