Hello!

Following situation:

There is a PC with 2 ohysical HDs and actually WinXP Installed on it. The
XP installation is spreaded over two disks so the partitions looks
following:

/dev/sda (the boot disk)
/dev/sda1 ntfs
/dev/sda2 extended
/dev/sda5 ntfs
/dev/sda6 ntfs
and a free space in size of about 10 GB

/dev/hdd (the second hd)
/dev/hdd1 ntfs
and the rest (about 65 GB ) is free

so I've tried to locate /boot in /dev/sda free space and / in /dev/hdd free
space but GRUB have seen only /dev/hdd. (this is not a bootable disk!) SO
how to install Linux (in this case Fedora Core 6) on such schema WITHOUT
repartitioning ?

Greg

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:07:29 +0100, Grzegorz Rumatowski wrote:

> Hello!
>
> Following situation:
>
> There is a PC with 2 ohysical HDs and actually WinXP Installed on it. The
> XP installation is spreaded over two disks so the partitions looks
> following:
>
> /dev/sda (the boot disk)
> /dev/sda1 ntfs
> /dev/sda2 extended
> /dev/sda5 ntfs
> /dev/sda6 ntfs
> and a free space in size of about 10 GB
>
> /dev/hdd (the second hd)
> /dev/hdd1 ntfs
> and the rest (about 65 GB ) is free
>
> so I've tried to locate /boot in /dev/sda free space and / in /dev/hdd free
> space but GRUB have seen only /dev/hdd. (this is not a bootable disk!) SO
> how to install Linux (in this case Fedora Core 6) on such schema WITHOUT
> repartitioning ?

First, Linux doesn't have to be installed on a "bootable" disk to boot.
The bootloader like GRUB takes care of that. On my first Linux install 7
years ago, I put everything on the second hard drive (Windows was on the
first, which was designated bootable), and booted Linux via a floppy, so I
wouldn't have to put anything Linux like the bootloader on the Windows
drive to keep it "pure" and to make it easy to uninstall Linux, if
there were problems. Worked just fine. I later put the bootloader LILO on
the Master Boot Record of the first -- Windows -- hard drive, and stopped
using the floppy to boot Linux. Worked just fine.

Second, you don't need to have a separate /boot partition on the first (or
any) drive anymore. All Linux really needs to work is a / partition. You
don't even need a /home or a /swap partition, although I (and others more
knowledgeable than I) recommend having both, but I have a couple of
notebooks with smaller hard drives and for space use efficiency only have
a /swap and a / with home being a directory in /. Works just fine.

During the install, you should be asked by the Fedora Core Installer where
you want to install GRUB. The Master Boot Record on /dev/sda is usually
the best place for it, so that it can be used to boot any other OSes on
your system. Isn't the FC6 Installer "seeing" /dev/sda? If it isn't,
something is wrong.

Stef

On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 04:14:10 GMT, Stefan Patric wrote:

> During the install, you should be asked by the Fedora Core Installer where
> you want to install GRUB. The Master Boot Record on /dev/sda is usually
> the best place for it, so that it can be used to boot any other OSes on
> your system. Isn't the FC6 Installer "seeing" /dev/sda? If it isn't,
> something is wrong.

During installation only while partitioning hardisks the installer see
/dev/sda but after partitioning if it is asking for placing GRUB MBR it
sees only /dev/hdd

Gregory