Problems installing RedHat with XP

Hi Everyone!

I am a complete newbie to Linux so please bear with me! I wasn’t sure in how much detail I should go in describing the problem!

I am trying to Install RedHat Linux 7.3 (Valhalla) which I downloaded from LinuxISO.org.

My current PC has 2 IBM HDD 45 GB on RAID 0 setup which I have partitioned as follows using Partition Magic:

(Drives are FAT32 Format)

Drive Partition Name:

• Windows • Apps • Data

I am currently running Windows XP Pro and want to install RedHat Linux on the Data Partition as that is currently empty.

I booted from the first CD and went through the various options until I got to something about partition the Drives. The options I get are:

• Automatically create partition for you.
• Manually Partition with Disk Druid
• Manually Partition with FDisk – Experts Only

I selected the second option first time round and then the third option second time round; however I get the following error:

The Partition table on Device HDE was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialised, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this Drive. Would you like to initialise this Drive?

When I clicked on NO/Cancel I got the following error:

An error has occurred – no valid devices were found in which to create new file systems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem.

Questions:

1. What I don’t know from all of this is which drive is it saying it can’t read the partition table off?

2. I don’t think there is a problem with the RAID setup as when the setup is initialising the Promise Fast track Driver is detected?

I am not sure how to select the Data Partition as the location where I want to install Linux.

Apologies for the lengthy explanation any help is much appreciated!

Thanks!

Martin Patterson

OK dude, what the best thing to do is, in Windows, using your favorite partitioning tool, create a partition of unallocated space of the size you want your linux install to be.

When you start the Linux installation process, the installer will go ooh look free space, I'll use this

Works all the time for me, let me know how you get on...

Hi rendy,

Thanks for the suggestion but I still get the same error message as before.

I used Partition Magic 7.0 and created a partition of unallocated space but it doesn’t seem to work.

Thanks for your help anyway

afaik not supported promise ide controllers are, but their raid mode is not.

Hey Martin sorry to bother you, but I've have the same problem like yours when installing red hat. But my problem was that after I installed redhat on the new driver, once I booted it will not charge either partition magic, nor linux nor xp. So it will open a linux screen asking for the desired OS but it will not charge any.

Another thing after I choose Linux, linux will ask me for a login id and password, but I never set any login or password.

If you could help me I will really appreciate it.


Thanks

Paolo

Next time please start a new thread.
This pertains to the boot loader, either LILO or GRUB, you need to configure it to add options of the other OS's on the computer. Ity should have allowed you to do this during installation but you can still fix it now, do a search on google for whatever your boot loader is.
It should have asked you for root password, use username root and password as you set and you can login to root account and create an account for everyday use (root account should be used for administration tasks only).

iirc, at that time (quote: July 29th, 2002), the linux promise ide raid drivers did not support the hardware raid features. No idea if they do today though. I am happy with linux software raid.