Andy said:
The following applies to one drive that is currently hooked up.
I installed a 300 Gb drive.
It's currently being formatted to ext2.
It will take 4 hrs.
Is that because of the 8 gb hidden partition that is being merged with the large partition ?
I will want at least 3 partitions.
(With Puppy and Windows on my other system, they both use less that 100 Gb.)
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Since it has no wireless card yet, I will get one recommended for Linux.
Second drive is also 300 gb and I don't know which Windows version was on it, but Disk Repair could not help.
I have some disk utilities, but they are on a CD and I have no CD/DVD burner.
Thanks,
Andy
You can get a USB optical drive, if you need
to move the drive from computer to computer.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151262
That one runs off USB bus power. Some users
seem to be indicating, you need a USB hydra
cable (two heads, second head carries more power),
to get enough bus power for fully reliable operation.
If one of those drives has a barrel connector on
the back, you may also be able to use a 5V adapter
to power it.
Still, that is a concept for moving the drive around.
Some people owning netbooks, which have no internal
optical drive, use gear like that.
As for the EXT2 format time, I don't know if EXT2
has a "quick format" option or not. I've seen long
format times, but the disk in question was
relatively slow, which did not help.
Linux will not be merging anything. It either
overwrites when you ask it to, or it leaves
a foreign partition alone. You read up on
the topic of installing that particular distro,
to understand the issues.
For example, through long experience, I would
never expect a Debian distro to "share nicely"
with other OSes. It always pesters you, to
delete everything else on the disk. If you try
to use custom setup options, you can never figure
out (no Help info) what options to use. So instead,
you're beaten into submission, to use the default,
which is to take over the entire disk. So rather
than do a lot of research for that one in particular,
I just give it an entire blank disk. As then
I don't have to worry about what it's going to
do. Some other distros have a better installer,
which I can program as required.
Paul
