Hi, I love Linux and want to add it to my machine. But don't know how. Can anyone help ?

Problem
I have 2 hard disks. On Quantum I got XP running smoothly (and sometimes slowly too ). Now I want to install Fedora3 on the 2nd hard disk (Fujistu). I need detail instructions as I'm new to Linux.

1) How do I hook up the data cables connecting the IDE slots (there're 2) on motherboard and the hard disks ?

2) Which disk needs to be Master and which is Slave ?

3) Do I need to create a /boot partition in the linux disk ? If so, what should be its size ?

4) What should be the size of /swap partition ?

5) Where should I install GRUB bootloader into, MBR or the /, or /boot partition ?

6) AFter installation, how do I boot into the OS's ???

Please be specific to the point as I don't know much about linux and PC. Those terminologies I picked up when reading articles for similar problems. But those didn't do much good.

Thank you for your help.

Cheers,

dn

The drives themselves don't matter.

Just use the cable that is connected to the drive where your Windoze XP is installed. There should be a second connector that isn't being used.

Your Windoze XP disk is already the master, leave it this way. The Linux drive can be the slave. Read the instructions that came with your drive to determine where the jumper should be positioned on the drive. The jumper is a little black square with two holes in it already resting on some pins physically on the drive. It should already be set to slave but it may not be.

You can if you wish. 10 GB should be enough, someone else can probably give you some better guidelines for partition sizes.

Typically 2x your physical RAM size. If RAM=512MB then swap can be 1GB.

There are two components to GRUB. One will reside in the MBR and the other will be in /boot. The MBR component is the bootstrap code and invokes GRUB so that it can either boot the Linux O/S or XP. If XP, it will invoke NTLOADER that XP installed.

GRUB is a boot manager and that is its job. Fedora will, by default, want to boot first and will have timer ticking down to automatically do so. You can change these settings after everything is working properly. Back up the grub.conf file before mucking with it. You can recover it with the emergency boot CD and put back the working one if you mess things up (this is coming from someone who messed his own up more than once on a tripple boot configuration).

The Fedora installer is very nice and takes care of most things for you.

Good luck

Thomas

I do not think you would ever need 10gigs for a /boot partition, if you mean / then sure, but not for the /boot partition. Currently my setup is:

/
/boot
/usr
/home

I have the partitions sizes as

/ = 3.5gigs
/boot = 100megs
/usr = 5.0gigs
/home =3.5gigs

After several years, my /boot has still only used 13megs of the 100megs.

Thank you all for your instructions. New problem popped up.

Why does the computer keeps restarting infinitely when I try to boot from the Fedora3 DVD ? I'm I've set the Bios to boot from CD-Rom first.

I've had installed Linux of older versions but have formatted the disk already. The DVD works fine as I tested it on my friend's laptop.