Guest LJM Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 I am brand new to Linux. I am trying to partition my machine (using second hard drive for install of Mandrake 10.1 = hdb and Windows XP Home running on hda) and when I hit "Done" after allocating partition, I get a warning message as follows: "Partion table of hda is going to be written to disk!" This scares me because I don't know what it is threatening to do. I cannot afford to kill my XP files and I don't want to (i) copy them to hdb or (ii) set up incorrect partitions or filetypes. Please help. LJ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 Welcome to the board. :) Hopefully someone will be along to help you shortly. If you don't get a response within a day or two, just post briefly in this thread to get back to the top of the heap. Please be patient and don't post duplicates - they cause confusion and are unnecessary - most people use the View New Posts facility. I've deleted all the ones I could find. :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durvish Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 It looks like Mandrake is about to rewrite your partitions on hda which would be bad. r u telling Mandrake to use your second drive (hdb) and then letting Mandrake set the partitions for you or are you doing this yourself? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 it's been a long time that I've let mandrake partition anything but....doesn't that just mean it's including the partition table info to the mbr on hda? It has to do that you know...to include hdb. Just guessing here because like I said...I haven't seen diskdrake in a while. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LJM Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 (edited) Durvish - it would be bad if it messed up hda. I am telling Mandrake to use the second drive (hdb) and then letting Mandrake set the partitions. bvc - i don't know anything about this but i agree that it could mean that it's giving hda the partition table info. i just want somebody to confirm it or i might kill hda, which would kill me. By the way, what is mbr? again, the warining is: "Partion table of hda is going to be written to disk!" The thing that has me worried is "table of hda". Am I not partitioning hdb? So would it not refer to partition table of hdb being written to hdb (and perhaps written to hda if that is necessary as bvc suggests). Is this just bad communication by the software's installation program? Edited January 12, 2005 by LJM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 I don't think its a problem either, as bvc mentioned its including the partition table info to the mbr. The mbr is the master boot record, and this is where your boot loader is usually written to. So in this case the bootloader is written to /hda (windoze) In stead of mandrake allocating the partitions for you, do it yourself. Run the install again but choose custom partitioning. Select /hdb for the install of mdk. Next window that appears will show you your current disks and partitions, click on hdb which will be blank. Create your partitions according to the space you have available, there are tools to resize if you screw up. You need at least a /root and a /home partition and ofcourse a swap partition. The swap should be roughly twice the size of your installed memory. After you finished click "done" Next screen shows you which partitions are going to be formatted, make sure its just those on /hdb. Thats it done. If your not sure about what size to make your /root or /home partitions ask here and give the total disk size. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 mbr=Master Boot Record after "Partion table of hda is going to be written to disk!" you would, or should see (I think) "Partioning hdb" but yes, wait for someone to confirm. I've never heard or seen diskdrake do what you are saying (not that it wouldn't or couldn't) but it has screwed up some of my partition table in the past (like 1.5 and 2 years ago)....so I only use Partition Magic 8 now since I also run win98, win2k and xp. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LJM Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 Ok. thank you to all. Not sure about what size to make your /root or /home partitions. my hdb is 30 gigabytes with 1gigabyte of installed ram. How should I partition? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 if all you plan to have on hdb is mandrake, and want to use it all for mandrake then I'd do 10GB for / 20GB for /home minus of course 200MB for swap I have 512MB RAM and never use more than 20% of my 200MB swap minmum would be 6GB for / 10GB for /home 200MB swap then you could make another partition for media and backups or whatever I call mine /xdata 14GB for /insert_name Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durvish Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 it's been awhile since I dual booted but I don't think mandrake writes to hda until it sets up the mbr later down the line. you could unplug the ide cable from the first hard drive -- mandrake should still see the second one as hdb since it is still a slave then after manny is set up go into mcc and add windows to grub or lilo dirty but it will work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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