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Preparing Your Hard Drive for Red Hat Linux
Before you install Red Hat Linux alongside Windows, you need to get your hard drive ready. This list provides an overview of the disk preparation process:
Put on a red fedora.
Back up your computer.
The processes we describe in this chapter should not affect your existing Windows installation. However, you can never be too safe when dealing with your precious files, so you should back them up. A description of how to back up a Windows computer is beyond the scope of this book. We suggest that you look into using a product like Norton Ghost 2003. That system both backs up and repartitions your computer. A side benefit of Ghost is that you can use it to repartition your hard drive. Numerous other commercial and freeware (not to be confused with open source) backup systems are available.
Determine how your Windows computer’s hard drive is formatted.
Microsoft Windows uses two types of disk formats: FAT (File Access Table) and NTFS (NT File System). FAT is older and less advanced than NTFS. However, free tools are available for resizing FAT-based disks to make room for Linux. You have to purchase commercial software to repartition NTFS systems.
Defragment your disk.
All resizing programs require you to defragment your disk before proceeding. Over time, the bits and bytes that comprise your files tend to get scattered around your hard drive. Resizing may not work or may even cause problems if your computer has too much fragmentation.
Repartition your computer’s hard drive to make room to install Red Hat Linux if you want to install it alongside Windows (or another operating system).
You can use either destructive or nondestructive resizing to make room for Linux. Destructive resizing wipes everything off your hard drive and starts fresh. Nondestructive resizing uses Windows utilities to dynamically shrink the existing partition and then uses the freed space to make a new Linux partition.
The open source FIPS (First nondestructive Interactive Partition Splitting) program is supplied with the full Red Hat Linux distribution to repartition FAT disks. You need to use commercial utilities, like PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost, to repartition NTFS disks; both these programs also work on FAT systems.
