Installation guide

DREA CR 2001-1077
749 to 751 of the "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation Resource Kit").
3. Installing Linux
The installation process is generally straightforward, following the procedure starting on page
33 of the Installation Guide. Special steps for our particular installation are mentioned in the
following paragraphs.
3.1 Booting the Installation Program (p. 36 of the guide)
We used the floppy boot disk supplied with the Red Linux distribution, after ensuring that the
disk was write protected.
3.2 Installation Class (p. 46 of the guide)
We selected "custom" as we needed control over how the dual-boot environment would be set
up.
3.3 Creating Partitions for Red Hat Linux (pp. 48 – 57)
Based on the advice of the DREA Computer Systems Group, we chose to use fdisk rather than
Disk Druid. The "FDISK tips" and the disk maps we previously printed out were helpful when
using fdisk. Note that DiskMap's partition tables differ from fdisk's tables:
1. DiskMap gives partition sizes in terms of sectors (512 bytes), whereas
fdisk gives partition sizes in terms of blocks (1024 bytes).
2. DiskMap numbers cylinders starting at 0, whereas fdisk starts numbering
at 1.
The partitioning proceeded as follows. For the EIDE drive, we added a 250 MB Linux native
primary partition (for /) after the second existing FAT partition. Then we created an extended
partition which occupied the rest of the disk. The extended partition was subdivided into two
Linux native logical partitions. The first logical partition (for /usr) occupied 1000 MB,
whereas the second logical partition (for /home) took up the rest of the extended partition.
For the SCSI drive, we added an extended partition after the existing NTFS partition. This
extended partition, which occupied the rest of the disk, was subdivided into four logical
partitions: three Linux swap partitions of 125 MB each, followed by a Linux native partition
(for /u1) which occupied the rest the rest of the space.
After partitioning the disks, we copied down fdisk's partition tables for future reference. The
partition tables for the system’s two drives, plus the mount points we assigned later, are
shown in tables 3 and 4: