Re: Installation

[AJT60@student.canterbury.ac.nz]

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Kent West wrote:

> At 10:54 PM 9/23/1998 +0000, Menno Scholten wrote: 
> 
> >
> > Hello there,
> >
> > I have a major problem with the installation of Debian. I already have
> > Windows as OS but I wanted to have Linux as well. So I downloaded the basic
> > files for installation. My harddisk has already 2 partitions, so I tried to
> > install it on D:\. Next I executed the installation program. Everything went
> > as planned, except that I don't now how to partion D:\ again so that I can
> > use one partition as swap disk (my first question).I solved this problem by
> > not using a swap disk at all ( I have 32 MB of RAM). But I sure like to
> use a
> > swap disk. 

Okay, so you have (at least) two partitions already in existance: what
Win/dos sees as C:\ and D:\. If you want a swap partition, you'll need to
make another partition. AFAIK the only way to do this with Windows is to
reformat your hard drive. Fortunately, there are other solutions. One is
to use Partition Magic, which is supposed to be wonderful and can create
and destory partitions at will without touching data on the other ones.
Unfortunately, you need to buy it. The other is to use fips, a DOS program
that comes with most Linux distributions. This is a little limited in that
it can only truncate partitions: you put all your files at one end of the
disk (by defragmentation) and partition at the other. The program comes
with documentation, and should be adequate for your purposes. So what I
would do is:
	1) defragment C:\
	2) use fips, and repartion D:\ to 32 megs (or however big you want
your swap partition to be), and create E:\ with the rest of the disk. 
	3) instal Debian on E:\

Legend has it that putting the swap partition earlier on the drive results
in a small performance increase. I have no idea whether this is true or
not. 

> > Anyway here is my major problem:
> >

Do you have a debian CD? If so, and you can convince your computer to boot
off it (most new computers can) you should be able to boot off the debian
CD and this should solve your problems. Even if you can't, you should be
able to create a boot disk (using rawrite like Kend suggested) and use
that to boot, and point the installation program at the CD-rom. 

Andrew Tarr

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate"