need a tutorial for HD installation

[drhadidy]

Hi guys... i have a new friend who is mad about linux and want to "convert"
i need a simple but fully detailed tutorial showing how to install a dual boot PCL with windows starting from desk partitioning and formatting till she has her system on and working))
thank you in advance

[ScratchingNails]

thnx hadidy ... yes plz Guys I'm really mad about it and need to convert

Help plz.

Thnx

[Old-Polack]

thnx hadidy ... yes plz Guys I'm really mad about it and need to convert

Help plz.

Thnx

The first thing we would need to know is what type machine this would be installed on. Next would be whether the machine in question has a single hard drive, or more than one. If only one, can a second be added?

The procedure would be radically different depending on whether both OS must reside on a single hard drive, or if they could each have their own drive.

[ScratchingNails]

Hi

My Machine processor is Intel Pentium 4 , 3.2  / 1 mega cash memory.

2 GB Ram.

2 Hard Disk and the main one has 3 Hard drives  C, D , E 

E is almost empty and I can divide it to 2 Hard Drives.

How many GB I need to have in the other Hard Drive to be able to Install Linux and the programs required ?

what are the steps ?

Thank You

[djohnston]

ScratchingNails,

Do you have a PCLinuxOS live CD you can boot from?

[Old-Polack]

Hi

My Machine processor is Intel Pentium 4 , 3.2  / 1 mega cash memory.

2 GB Ram.

2 Hard Disk and the main one has 3 Hard drives  C, D , E 

E is almost empty and I can divide it to 2 Hard Drives.

How many GB I need to have in the other Hard Drive to be able to Install Linux and the programs required ?

what are the steps ?

Thank You

No offense intended, but this is Linux, not Windows. Here a hard drive is exactly that. What Windows calls drives could be either an actual hard drive or simply a partition on a hard drive. What was asked is the number of actual physical hard drives, so the answer is two. The next thing we need to know it the size of each of those two drives, and if the computer BIOS allows for the selection of which hard drive will be the boot drive. (note that this is different from where one chooses boot order between floppy, cdrom, hard drive, or USB device) Are the hard drives IDE or SATA hard drives, and is the optical drive IDE or SATA.

Does the BIOS allow booting from a USB device? This is probably not important in itself, but does help to date and identify the BIOS type, so we have a better idea of what options we might have.

If you have a PCLinuxOS liveCD that you can boot to, we can tell you how to gather the information asked for, in the manner that will be most helpful to us.

[ScratchingNails]

ok the Answers are

* 2 Hard drives

   one of them is 250 GB  "western Digital"
   the other is 500 GB "Seagate"

* Both Sata

* Optical Hard Drive is DVD rom Sata also.

* Yes I can select between the 2 Hard Drives whither I Want the WD or Seagate to be the one I boot from.

* I Donno If I have the option to boot from USB. Never tried that before.

* Yes I have PCLinuxOS Live CD

Did I answer all ?

[ScratchingNails]

No Answer yet ?

[Old-Polack]

No Answer yet ?

Sorry for the delay, I got hung up on development issues.

Not answers, yet, just more questions. When Windows is involved, it has some nasty habits concerning other installations. The safest way to have a dual boot is to have Windows on its own drive, and Linux on a separate second drive, with the Linux drive being set as the boot drive. Is this acceptable to you? Can the a second hard drive be repartitioned and reformatted to be used exclusively as a Linux drive?

[ScratchingNails]

That would be so Hard
I can't do this ... I need them as they are ... is there any other options like reformatting one of the partitions of the HD and make it for linux ?

[Old-Polack]

That would be so Hard
I can't do this ... I need them as they are ... is there any other options like reformatting one of the partitions of the HD and make it for linux ?

What does that mean? We don't currently know much about the hard drives, how they are partitioned, where Windows is installed, what the other partitions contain, how full they are, or anything else about them, except there are two of them, the sizes of each, and the main one has Windows installed on it, but we haven't been told which hard drive you consider to be the main one. 

Start by booting the liveCD. Open a terminal, su to root, then at the prompt, enter;

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l                       <Enter>      <-- That's a lower case L, not a number 1

Post your results.