OK, I'll try and shead a little light on this subject for you. The way drive lettering under Linux works is like this. The first drive in your system, i.e. the primary master drive is called /dev/hda. This is probably what your hard drive will be. Each partition on this drive is assigned a number, so your primary dos partition which will contain your windows operating system will be partition 1, or in terms of devices /dev/hda1. when you are in fdisk print your partitions by hitting the letter p. you should see /dev/hda1 and it is probably of type fat32, which would indicate that it's your windows partition. If there is a second partition on your drive i.e. /dev/hda2 that is what under windows would be called your d:\ drive, or better put, your d:\ partition. So if thats where you want to installed Linux, delete the hda2 partition by hitting the letter d in fdisk, and entering 2 as the partition number that you want to delete. If you don't see a partition there we could assume that it's unallocated space on your hard drive. Now you need to make a new partition, or a couple of partitions, one for your linux filesystem and one for swap space. Matt Campbel explains well in his installing linux tutorial how to make these partitions. so we would now have 3 partitions on the drive /dev/hda1 which is the windows 98 filesystem /dev/hda2 which is linux swap space /dev/hda3 which is the linux file system. so back in the Debian installer tell it that you want to use /dev/hda2 for swap space, and /dev/hda3 as linux file space. and you should be right from there. Hope this clears it up a bit for you. ----- Original Message ----- From: "ADFM" <flodabay@hotmail.com> To: <blinux-list@redhat.com> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 5:37 AM Subject: Partition help > I am trying to understand all this partition creation. I am trying to follow Mat Campbell's installation MP3's of his tutorial of installing Debian, however, I am not understanding the partition creation. > > A year ago I replaced a failing HD with a new Maxtor 30GB HD. I used fdisk and formated the new drive. I said yes to two partitions. A 14.2GB drive C and a 14.2 drive D were created. After formating drive C with my Windows 98 SE disk, I started loading programs and created data capture directories. I see some Windows files on drive D although I do not remember formating drive D. This was the first HD that failed on me since I started using computers since July 1984. I am not sure how to keep the 14.2GB partition for Windows 98SE and format the rest for Debian. Any help would be greatly appreciated. > > Angus MacKinnon > Adaptive Computer Educator, ACE > Web page: http://members.shaw.ca/dabneyadfm > MAILTO:flodabay@hotmail.com > Choroideremia Research Foundation Inc. > http://www.choroideremia.org > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list >