RedHat 9 install issues

[Mojo2000]

Hi folks. I have used Mandrake 8.1/8.2 for a semester and learned how nice and gentle it could be for a WinStooge. But I let Linux go for a year and a half due to insufficient time and patience to learn and do everything I needed to do.

Recently I got interested in RedHat, so I downloaded version 9 from LinuxISOs (what is "Shrike" anyway?) and also Mandrake 9.1. All MD5 checksums matched. General system specs are in my .sig link. My hard drive space is as follows:

20 GB drive in two 10 GB partitions:
- C:\ NTFS, 949 MB free
- E:\ Fat32, 3.95 GB free

80 GB drive in two partitions:
- D:\ Fat32, 31.9 GB total, 13.0 GB free
- F:\ NTFS, 42.5 GB total, 16.7 GB free

**************

My issues or questions.

1. If I wanted to use D:\ for Linux, couldn't I use either distro's partition manager to divide this Fat32 and resize the resulting partitions? I'm sure a 10 GB chunk would serve me for a good while. The question is just whether I can do this reliably and non-destructively. I searched for info and learned that NTFS resizing is now common and safe...

Yeah yeah yeah, I know I should back up anyway before any major disk operation.

2. I booted up into Anaconda and tried to start my RH install. When I got to the screen displaying existing HD volumes, after about ten seconds my mouse pointer was still responding but none of the buttons in the program worked. Ctrl-Alt-Del had no effect. I assumed this was effectively a lockup. Anybody have ideas on what happened?

[Mojo2000]

Just wondering if anyone can at least commiserate on my issue, if not actually provide help. :p

I don't know if this explains anything, but under Windows I tried to perform a SMART hard-drive diagnostic and came up with 45% reliability on my 80-GB, in both partitions. Yuck - this drive is only a year old. So I downloaded and ran Seagate's diagnostic utility. The results can be viewed in this (http://www.phifamily.com/SEAGATE.LOG) text file.

[Icarus]

Well, Shrike is just the name they used for that release, they have a long history of using interesting names for their releases...Shrike just tells us that it's Red Hat version 9 :)

The only distro that I have used that comes with a partition resizer is Mandrake 9.1, Red Hat can create and distroy existing partitions, but can not resize them (yet, I'm hoping the next release of Frodra, the new user Red Hat, will include this)

Figure out where exactly D:\ is located, I'll guess /dev/hdd1 maybe /dev/hde1
The partitioning tool in RH9 will help you find it also. Let RH remove this partition and work with what's left, the menu options should help with doing this...just read them carefully and slowly, assuming things will result in trouble ;)

If it locks up again, hit Ctrl+Alt+F3
Welcome to Linux, the rule of Windows no longer applies :)
This should show any errors you might be getting during the install (among many other background messages)
I wouldn't worry about what SMART says, once the partition is created and formated it should be ok...as you said it's only a year old...but you said it's a Seagate, I thought they fixed that problem :p

[Mojo2000]

Thank you for replying! :D

So, would you say that Mandrake's resizer works non-destructively on FAT32's, at least in theory?

I would post in the Mandrake forums, since I would probably get an unequivocal answer there. However, since I didn't buy a boxed package, I'd feel guilty about placing demands on their time. :p

[Icarus]

I can say for fact that it work non-destructivly on NTFS, and if that works there is no reason for FAT32 not to work :D

Of course there is the little disclaimer...backup the drive first as this may destroy the data, yadda yadda yadda...

Besure the partition is well defraged in Windows before doing this, otherwise you may have troubles finding some data later :)