Can't tell which hard drive to install Fedora 13 OS to.

[Joel Rees]

Reading the mixed bag of advice in this thread, I guess I'll jump in
and spread my own brand of opinions disguised as advice.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:56 AM,  <allen at math.binghamton.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am using a laptop with two hard drives in it, one which has Windows
> Vista installed on it, and another physical drive which is a Data drive,
> each of them are 150 GB in capacity.  I wanted to convert my Data drive
> into a disk that has Fedora 13 (KDE Spin) on it.

The first question I would ask is whether the drive MSWindows is
calling "Data" is empty or not.

If it's empty, great. If not, of course you will not forget to back it
up. You want to back up any data you have already saved to the boot
drive, as well.

Not so much that bad things happen, just that it makes it a little
easier to forge ahead when you aren't sure.

>  I made a 2GB USB pen
> drive into a LiveUSB with the KDE Spin ISO file on it and my computer
> boots up fine into Fedora 13 with it.  However, when I go to "Install to
> Hard Drive," I am presented with a conundrum.

I remember feeling like this the first time I installed Red Hat 7 or
so (back in the day). They do mention, I believe, that gparted will
not write the new partition until you tell it to, but it still feels a
little scary, especially if you haven't backed up. (Okay, I admit, I
hadn't. It's only bitten me once, and it was resizing with
PartitionMagic that bit me. Re-sizing is not really the best option.)

> When I go to select which
> drive I want to install the Fedora OS to, the drives are virtually
> indistinguishable, save for differing IDs which are just strings of random
> numbers and letters.  I can't, for example, tell from this how much space
> is left on either, or which drive has Windows installed on it, and I don't
> want to partition one for Fedora 13 only to find out that it was the drive
> with Windows on it and end up losing all of my information.  Does anyone
> know of a way to distinguish between the two, or can anyone help me
> through this process?  Thank you for your time and help!
>
> Dan

As I said, gparted won't actually write the partition data until you
tell it to, and it will warn you. Moreover, much of the information
you want is available in gparted.

Hmm. Now I see the problem. The current installers assume that the
user is going to be scared of gparted and doesn't mention it directly.
Don't be scared of gparted. gparted doesn't actually write the
partition out until you let it do so. So go ahead and use gparted to
explore the existing partition maps and play around with them. Just
don't let it take that final step of writing out the map. (It does
tell you that writing the map out will destroy any existing data and
asks if you're sure, so just tell it, "No" at that point.)

By the way, you don't have to be installing to use gparted. I believe
it will be in the system tools menu of the live Fedora image. I think
it will allow to even mount NTFS partitions, which is even better than
looking at the free space and such.

And, if you are comfortable with the command line,

man mount

and

man gparted

and

man lvm

for lots of good reading. (Okay, you can find a lot of the stuff to
read through the GUI help system, too, I just don't like to wait for
the GUI system to do all the GUI stuff when I only want to read.)

Joel Rees