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

Joel Rees joel.rees at gmail.com
Sat Sep 18 01:34:38 UTC 2010


On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:35 AM, JD <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 09/15/2010 12:56 PM, 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.  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.  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
> Do you have PartitionMagic?
> If so, you can use it to compact both disks, and shrink the
> partition size (graphically) and leave room for Linux.
> Should not need more than 8GB for linux and 2GB for swap.

8G really is not enough. Unless, I suppose, the only purpose is to run
Firefox, Abiword, Gramps, gnumeric, and gnucash. Still kind of tight,
especially when you update.

Besides, (1) re-sizing is dangerous. Period.

Yeah, PartitionMagic bit me once. Luckily, I only had about 20M of
data that I had to recover through the floppy drive using DOS
commands. Luckily, DOS mounted the volume PM killed. And, yeah, I knew
that re-sizing the sixth time was pushing my luck. But I decided I
prefer to plan ahead after that.

Plan ahead and not cut my partitions too close.

> If you plan to install a lot of software packages, and have a
> lot of room for data you will generate under linux, then you
> have to be the judge of that. It is always good to have 2-4
> GB of swap space.

And what if the computer has 4G of RAM?

Double the size of RAM, assign that much for swap.

Joel Rees

> [...]


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