Hi Gabriel,
I am having some issues with CentOS 5.
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I am running a clean install of CentOS 5 i386 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 (Core Due, 1GB RAM) with SELinux on "enforcing".
I've just received my new 6400 (T7400, 2GB, 160GB, Vista Home Premium) and I'd like to install CentOS 5 too. With big surprise (looking at the partition table first and then, googling, http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm) I found that Dell is used to use the whole of the four partitions (see the url above for details).
Did you remove any of these partitions (e.g. the Media Direct one)? Could you share your experience? I'd like to preserve the base functionalities without preventing me to use CentOS 5 as the master OS.
Thanks in advance, Matteo
I've just received my new 6400 (T7400, 2GB, 160GB, Vista Home Premium) and I'd like to install CentOS 5 too. With big surprise (looking at the partition table first and then, googling, http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm) I found that Dell is used to use the whole of the four partitions (see the url above for details).
Did you remove any of these partitions (e.g. the Media Direct one)? Could you share your experience? I'd like to preserve the base functionalities without preventing me to use CentOS 5 as the master OS.
I removed all partitions and reinstalled from scratch. My machine came with XP Home and I replaced it with XP pro on a small partition (10 GB).
If I remember correctly, you can reinstall the dell software and it will only wipe the first partition (sda1), but that only applies to XP.
Let me know if you have any other doubts :)
Gabriel
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On Monday 30 April 2007 12:47, first last wrote:
Hi all,
Did you remove any of these partitions (e.g. the Media Direct one)? Could you share your experience? I'd like to preserve the base functionalities without preventing me to use CentOS 5 as the master OS.
I removed all partitions and reinstalled from scratch. My machine came with XP Home and I replaced it with XP pro on a small partition (10 GB).
If I remember correctly, you can reinstall the dell software and it will only wipe the first partition (sda1), but that only applies to XP.
Here is what I've done to preserve any Dell factory configuration, first of all Dell boot partition and Media Direct.
My first attempt was to use the Media Direct XP OS for dual booting CentOS 5 through its boot.ini but issues came up and then I decided to configure the (new) Vista boot manager. Find below a summary of the steps.
0. Changed the BIOS to boot from CD/DVD first (!); 1. Boot Knoppix [1] to check that Linux can happily run on my Inspiron; 2. Shrink the original Vista partition to free 40GB using its Disk Management tool. You can also apply the method described in [2]: please take care of the extra effort of shrinking C:\ w/o using Vista itself; 3. Boot System Rescue CD [3] to run gparted to move&resize the extended partition in which there is the 2GB logical partion, type DD [4], for Media Direct: I kept the 2GB partition as the last one; 4. Run CentOS 5 installation. Anaconda was unable to setting up my 4 partitions scheme (/boot, swap, /, /home) claiming for ...blahblahblah...could not allocate cylinder_based partitions as primary partitions autpart.py(949) processPartiotioning...blahblahblah.... No help from the other consolles (ALT+Fn). I decided to give gparted a chance and it was able to successfully perform any of the requested operations; 5. Rerun of CentOS 5 installation, customizing all the steps plus w/o installing grub on MBR to avoid any break w/ Dell boot sequence; 6. Run CentOS 5 DVD in rescue mode to install grub into /, extract grub MBR (512 bytes) and save it into the /boot as e.g. centos5.mbr; 7. Create a grub.conf (plus symlinks menu.lst and /etc/grub.conf) to boot the original xen.gz-2.6.18-8.el5 kernel; 8. Boot Knoppix to access the FAT32 Media Direct Partion both to copy the CentOS 5 grub MBR and to change boot.ini; 9. Press the Media Direct button... the XP boot manager comes up to let you choose CentOS. Unfortunately each time you'll use Vista, pressing the "standard" power button, the Media Direct boot.ini will be rewrite and I found no way to avoid it... but... I found an easy way to use bcdedit.exe to edit the Vista boot manager, thanks not only to the docs from MSDN [5][6] but mostly to this good post [7].
Now I happily run CentOS 5 on my Inspiron :) Next steps: finalize the CentOS 5 configuration and try to boot CentOS 5/Vista using a virtual machine (VMware) and Vista/CentOS 5, respectively, as host.
Ciao, Matteo
[1] http://www.knoppix.net/get.php [2] http://gparted.free.fr/screenshots/VISTA/Howto_move_VISTA.html [3] http://www.sysresccd.org/Download [4] http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista.htm [5] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468626.aspx [6] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms791482.aspx [7] http://www.techspot.com/vb/showpost.php?p=438097&postcount=1
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Matteo Scaramuccia