Ok, here goes

[OnDborder]

Well I finally have my box put together;
Western Digital 60gig
256ram
MSI turbo lite
1gig axisY
Creative Annihilator mx2
sk-6

I haven't put anything else in, to keep it simple, at first.

Here's my question to the people who know better....
I installed 98se on the C drive and then used Partition Magic to make a D and E drive, both fat 32. I plan on using D for w2k and E(30gigs) for storage and RedHat 7.1.
Will this work or will the fat32 on E mess it up?

[tbirdkiri]

from what i know of Linux & fat32 dont mix.
thats ok just get a copy of linux and use the partioning tool to wipe that partion and use ext3 filesystem.

[XWRed1]

Yea, Linux doesn't use the drive letter designations that Windows does. That E drive that you want to share between Redhat and the random storage will need to be split into at least 3 partitions: 1 for your storage, as Fat32 (or whatever), 1 for the actual Linux OS (without a filesystem. i.e., don't format until you start installing Linux), and 1 for Linux swap (once again, unformatted).

Although, if you're really, really masochistic, you can install Linux onto a fat32 partition.

[OnDborder]

Will the installation software for Redhat do the formatting or will I have to section off a non-fat partition in the e drive?

[David]

Use DOS FDISK to split it in two - 1 for FAT32 storage and another large one which we will deal with later. Start up the red hat install program and split the spare partition in two and format them.

PS You can use linux on a dos fs - UMSDOS - but its slow and crap.

[OnDborder]

"Make it simple"?
I decided to leave off the w2k for now.
So I will have the D drive available for the linux.
I started out for the primary purpose of getting familiar with linux not on how many OS's I can fit on a HD. :)