Aqua-Soft ForumsWould anyone be kind enough to tell me what the proper procedure is for partitioning a hard drive in two? Let’s say for the sake of argument that backing up is not important nor is the probability of losing data. The reason for this post is because I managed to corrupt some boot sectors of my old hard drive (Which I recently received the replacement from Maxtor) because I may have screwed up the process while trying to install Red Hat or Fedora.
What I did was, while XP was still installed using all of the drive, I used the boot / installation CD to delete all partitions and create 2 new ones. Rather than have two it turned out to be 3 since XP automatically made an 8Mb partition for some odd reason. I first installed XP (over again) on the C section thinking that if I installed Linux first that Lilo would not recognize Windows. Then I installed Linux on the D section but ran into some problems when it asked where I wanted to install it. (Something about a boot loader?) Well after screwing around I finally got it to work and all seemed fine until I tried to install NVIDIA drivers under Linux. Red Hat 9 drivers were screwed up so I decided that since I could not enable hardware acceleration that I may as well not use it at all. Having made that choice I used the XP CD to once again remove all partitions and installed it over one section that used all available free space. It was at that point that I noticed that the boot up loading time slowed down to a crawl and was later confirmed by the Maxtor disk scanner that I indeed made some big mistakes.
I would really like to know what the proper way of doing this is so that I don’t have to RMA my current drive. Thank you in advance for any help that you would care to toss my way.