🚀 go-pugleaf

John James wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I wish to install RH 5.2 on my Win95 machine which has Drive E: (890 Mb)
> free for this.  However when I try to install I am offered drive hda1
> and hda2 and advised to delete the DOS details for hda2.
>
> I am afraid to do this as I feel this will also wipe all the data I have
> on drive D: which also resides on hda2.
>
> Can any one help please?

hda represents the whole first physical Hard Disk in your system.
hdb represents the whole second disk etc.

This is regardless of what partitions you may have installed on them.
So even if the drive has 4 partitions, it still represents the whole
drive, ( and you can access the whole drive through /dev/hda I think
as well, but don't do it ;-).)

hda1 is the first partition of the first drive, hda2 is the second
partition
etc.

Anyway if you have already cleaned an entire partition for use
with Linux (i.e. you have no DOS/Windows stuff or data there you want
to keep) it would be best to completely delete this partition using
DOS fdisk (not the Linux fdisk).

These will leave 890M of unpartitioned space on the drive.
Then when you are installing Linux you can create the partitions
you want using Disk Druid and you'll know you're not wiping
any DOS data.

BTW It would probably be best to partition this 890 into a
number of different partitions.

Say for example

/   (root)    80M
<swap parition>   say 64M
/var           64M
/var/tmp   64M
/tmp          64M
/usr           400M
/home       the rest approx 150M

NOTE: These are just what I would do.  They are very rough and you can
probably get
better advice, but I know when I was starting I just wanted SOMEONE to give
me
some ballpark figures.  There are HOWTOS that relate to disk partitioning
that
are worth a read as well.

>
>
> Also is there a switch that can be used with startx to select the
> monitor being used.  I am installing on a notebook for which I also have
> a large external monitor which will at times be connected.
>

I don't know about this I'm afraid.

>
> Cheers
>
> John

Cheers
Mark Jeacocke
markj@mincom.com