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If you’re not installing directly off the CD-ROM, you next need to repartition your current hard drive to make room for Linux. This may cause problems, because repartitioning a hard drive destroys any data contained on the affected partitions. After making room for Linux, you need to boot the Linux system and create its new partitions and file systems. Typically, Linux systems need a primary partition to store the files on and a swap file partition, especially if you have a machine with 8MB or less of memory.
NOTE: A file system is basically a section of your hard drive specially formatted to hold certain types of files. UNIX and Linux use file systems to represent entire sections of the directory tree. This is in contrast to MS-DOS, which places subdirectories in the directory tree on the same logical drive. UNIX systems use the directory tree format because placing subdirectories on different drives is safer. If one drive malfunctions, only the information on that drive needs to be replaced or fixed.
• See “Understanding File Systems,” p. 266
After creating the file systems, you then install the Linux operating system, its support files, and various application packages distributed with the system. To install Linux, you must first boot a stripped-down version of the operating system. You do this by creating a boot disk and a supplemental disk set containing the stripped-down OS.
You need to create the boot and supplemental disks by using the rawrite program. You can find this program on the accompanying CD-ROM in the /dosutils subdirectory. For this step, you need two formatted floppies: one labeled boot and the other labeled supp. Place the boot disk in the A drive and enter the following:
E:\dosutils>rawrite Enter disk image source file name: e:\images\boot.img Enter target diskette drive: A: Please insert a formatted diskette into drive A: and press -ENTER-
If you want to abort the process, simply press <Ctrl-c> to stop. If rawrite fails, try a new formatted disk. If the problem persists, you should have your hardware checked for possible problems.
After writing the boot disk, you need to create the supplemental disk. Simply use the supp image file name (supp.img) as the source filename in the preceding command sequence.
After you back up your system and make the necessary boot and supplemental disks, you must prepare your system’s hard drive for Linux.
CAUTION:
This process is the most dangerous because maximum data loss is assured. If you haven’t backed up your system, do so now. Although you can use an experimental program called FIPS and commercial programs such as Partition Magic to do non-destructive repartitioning, a full backup is recommended, just in case problems occur.
In the early days of PCs, hard drives were few and far between. Most computers used floppies to hold the operating system, programs, and their data. With the introduction of the IBM PC XT, IBM introduced a 10MB hard drive. Early operating systems such as DOS could access only a limited amount of space on hard drives. Then hard drive manufacturers kept expanding the space on their hard drives more quickly than the operating system’s capability to access the additional space. The operating system got around this problem by letting the user split the hard drive into sections, called partitions. These partitions can hold program files, other operating systems, or data.
Typical MS-DOS systems have one partition, which is referred to as drive C. If you split the drive into partitions, these partitions are typically referred to in alphabetical order as D, E, and so on. MS-DOS also allows you to install multiple hard drives, so that the next drive in this chain might be referred to as F.
UNIX and Linux don’t use drive letters to refer to partitions; instead, they use directory names to refer to partitions. Also, as indicated earlier, Linux users can place different directories on different partitions and even on different drives. You can also place different operating systems on different partitions.
Partitions are specified in a section of the hard drive referred to as the boot record in what’s called a partition table. This table is used by the various operating systems to determine what operating system to boot and where their files can physically be found on the hard drive. The boot record is used to boot, or start up, the machine’s operating system. Linux’s boot program, LILO (LInux LOader), and other boot managers use this section of the hard drive, typically found on the first sectors of the drive, to control which operating system to start.
The partition table holds information about the locations and sizes of the various partitions on the hard drive. There are three kinds of partitions: primary, extended, and logical. DOS and some other operating systems must boot from primary partitions. Hard drives can contain only four primary partitions. An extended partition doesn’t contain data itself; instead, it allows the user to define other, logical partitions on the drive. Thus, to get around the limit of four primary partitions, you can define an extended partition and then define other logical partitions within the extended partition.
Some operating systems, such as MS-DOS and versions of OS/2 before version 2.0, require that they be installed in a primary partition, but they can access logical drives in extended partitions. This is important to remember if you’re going to have a DOS system and a Linux system reside on the same drive. DOS must go in a primary partition.
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