Installing Gentoo on home computer

Fissile · Guru Joined: 23 Nov 2003 Posts: 470

Hey all.. heres a little bit background about my situation... i was completely unaware of what the heck linux was about 2-3 weeks ago, much less gentoo.. i have installed gentoo on my univ comp... which i absolutely love... now i am going home for christmas break and want o install gentoo on the home comp aswell.. but do not want to remove xp as no one in my family is very computer literate and might run into serious problems if i do...

From what i remember: its a p4 2.6, 512 ram, intel extreme 32 mb graphic card and 80 gb hd.. sry thats all i could remember...

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basically wat i am asking is a sure-fire way or confirmation that installing gentoo wont screw up the xp os.. and the big don'ts to avoid

plus some basic guidlines about disk paritiion and setup...

ps: ino i can read the manual which i have read like a million times in the last few weeks, but still a human reply is better....

thxx....
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The Only Thing Necessary for The Triumph of evil is for Good Men To do Nothing!...

CDLM · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 9:00 am Post subject:

well if you're going to install Gentoo on an already partitioned drive, you're going to need to free up some space by resizing the windows partition - you'll need a tool like PartitionMagic to do that. If the graphics card is onboard, use lilo as the bootloader. set the timeout to about 5 seconds and have windows load as default

resizing can be dangerous though... I've had some bad experiences with resizing both fat32 and ntfs partitions... i'd backup critical data first...

- Dave -

Eldomir · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 9:02 am Post subject:

Well, I aso had winXP installed and wanted basically the same as you...Here's what I did, I'm sure there's many and better ways, but it worked for me

First, I created the linux partitions with PartitionMagic (a windows program, have to pay for it). I'm sure you can use fdisk, but being the sissy that I am I was more comfortable with the GUI of PM. Initially, my computer had a "windows boot/recovery" partition and the NTFS partition. I created four more:

1. A FAT partition which I call "bridge". Since NTFS writing seems still shakey in Linux, I use that partition (readable and writable from both Win and Linux) to pass data around between the two.

2. A Linux boot partition (I made it ext3, safe bet

).

3. A Linux root partition (idem).

4. A Linux swap partition.

Then, I rebooted from the gentoo livecd and followed the Installation Guide's instructions to the letter. I didn't change the partitions with fdisk, since I had already done it from Windows (the sissy way), all I did was mark the linux "boot" partition as bootable. The rest of the installation went smoothly.

My main problem (remember I'm a chicken) is that I didn't want to use GRUB to overwrite the MBR without being certain it would boot Windows safely. So what I did was create a GRUB boot diskette (not using any grub.conf file at first), so that it booted to the ugly GRUB prompt. From that prompt and reading the Gentoo installation guide, I tried and tried until I could manually boot both Gentoo and Windows without problems. Then, I created the grub.conf file with the lines I had used manually, and installed GRUB in the MBR (overwriting Windows, *shiver*)...and it all worked. Now I boot between XP and Gentoo and everything works very nicely

If you need more specific info just post...this was done a month ago so it's all still fresh. Good luck!

Pedro
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-- Terry Pratchett

Fissile · Guru Joined: 23 Nov 2003 Posts: 470

Hey thx u 2.. that was really quick... ky i confortable with the gentoo installation process just not very clear how to begin.. let me summarize what i understand rite now:

I should get partition magic... Eldomir i feel for u bro.. y did u pay for it? u could have gotten it just as easily from any irc or torrent site, even kazaa

... after i have created a second linux parition that is to divide the hd in half.. lets say... 50-30... 50 gb for window-30gb for gentoo...

then i should simply boot through live cd and do the installation? ... a quick question though... what will my partition read out look like when i type fdisk... and secondly when u say i should create linux parition ... (i vaguely rem somethign about linux partition in partition magic)... what type of partition can i create? is it some speical type or just a normal partition that i could create even with 98-fdisk...

thxxx....

ps: i really appreciate u guyz taking the time to exam me and writing those huge msges... thx again...
_________________
The Only Thing Necessary for The Triumph of evil is for Good Men To do Nothing!...

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 6:47 pm Post subject:

In case you are looking for some free (and legal) ways to resize an NTFS partition, here are 2 that I have tried :

Qtparted is a Partition Magic clone. You can find it on recent KNOPPIX CDs

DiskDrake is a graphical partitioning utility on Mandrake's installation CD. Mandrake 9.1 and newer can resize NTFS partitions.

Fissile · Guru Joined: 23 Nov 2003 Posts: 470

can't i just use the fdisk on win98 startup disk to create a partition? will such partition work as a base for linux?
_________________
The Only Thing Necessary for The Triumph of evil is for Good Men To do Nothing!...

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 9:33 pm Post subject:

Fissile · Guru Joined: 23 Nov 2003 Posts: 470

kool thxxx....
_________________
The Only Thing Necessary for The Triumph of evil is for Good Men To do Nothing!...