Linux Partition?

[Reign of Chaos]

Hi everyone. Well to start off I have been coming here for a while now and finding this site very helpful including this forum. All the information here helped me build my first computer with very few problems, but now I need your help. So on to my first post I guess.

Lately I have been hearing a lot of good things about Linux so I want to give it a try. I plan on having a dual boot with win xp and Redhat 7.3. First I made two partitions in fdisk and install xp on one. When I tryed to install Redhat I got to the "disk partitioning setup" and ran into a problem. I picked " have the installer automatically partition for you" and got a window that said

"The partition table on /tmp/hda is inconsistent..." It goes on to say that it may cause some (fixable) problems with boot loaders and problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is recommened.

Does anyone here know what I could have done wrong? Also what is LBA? Any help would be great!

[abomb7682]

LBA is "logical block addressing". When dividing a harddrive into partitions LBA is like the map to the start and end of each partition. Basically it converts cylendar, head, and sector specs of a drive into addresses that can be read by the BIOS. You probably didn't need to know that.

For your problem i woudl recommend running DOS fdisk again, and deleting the second partition you made with the intent of putting linux on. Linux doens't like FAT partitions, and it can run from them but its more complication that yo u dont need. Just use fdisk to delete it and leave it as unused hardrive space. Then when you run RH installer and select automatic partitioning it should use the empty space to create a linux native partition (called EXT3) and a linux swap partition, both of which are necissary for linux to load.

If the red hat installer still finds an error let us know. Good luck.

[Reign of Chaos]

Hi abomb.

Thanks for the info. At least I will know what LBA is from now on. Anyways I went into fdisk and did what you said and IT WORKED! The install process worked without any problems. Thanks for the help. The only guestion now is what to do with Linux? I guess I will play around with it a bit.