[NTLUG:Discuss] Newbie needs help

[Adam C. Edwards]

At 06:58 PM 08/08/99 -0500, you wrote: 
>>>>
Evening to all. 
I have been reading all the post here with great interest, thank all of you
for your thoughtful replies. It's my turn to stick my neck in the noose. I
would like to know if I can safely use the C: primary 
of my 4 gig Western Digital which is already loaded with Windoz98 and uses
the first half of the hd to also load Read Hat 5.2. The D: partition was
preset as an extended drive, and FIPS will not allow it to be split. 
    Would it be possible to migrate all my non-essential programs to the D:
extended which would give me more than enough space, and split the C:. 
<<<<

>>>>
If I am reading this correctly you have a single 4 gig drive divided into 2
partitions.  A Primary dos partition acting as drive C and an Extended dos
partition with a logical dos drive called D on it.

You'd like to load Linux onto somewhere and play?  Is there enough space on
drive C for the contents of drive D?  Windows98 isn't supposed to support
this but there was a command in DOS for giving a directory a drive letter.
SUBST I believe?  The manuals should be of some help.  You should be able
to copy the contents of the d drive to a directory on C call D_drive or
some such.  You can then hide the directory and include the correct line in
your autoexec.bat file to treat the Directory as Drive D.  (This will keep
any symlinks/shortcuts intact)  Once you've got that done and you're happy
that it's working correctly you can format the extended partition's logical
drive and use that for LINUX.  Once you've got it wiped you should be able
to boot via the Win98 startup disk.  This will give you a command prompt
and access to the CDROM.  (I assume you have redhat on CDROM.)  Go to the
CDROM and run Install.bat or Whatever it uses to start the install (It may
be as easy to just boot from the rescue floppy.  

Once you have the install program running you should be able to convert the
dos ext partition into a linux partition and linux swap partition and
you'll be off and running.  Depending upon your preferences you'll probably
find it easiest to make a boot floppy to boot from or some such.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt as I run Slink (Debian
2.1) and redhat may make it harder to get your hands as dirty as I seem to
be proposing.

If need be I have a similar setup on my Win98 machine and would be cool
with wiping my extended partition and seeing if what I propose is possible
even. <G>

TTYL,
	A