Installing CentOS 6 (Lxf 150)

Nuke — Tue Dec 20, 2011 6:04 pm

Author: Nuke

Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2011 6:04 pm

Going back a few months I know, but I thought CentOS, said to be very stable, might make a good VM host. [Any comment from you guys so far?]

Anyway, I dont want to replace my present Distro yet, so, from the LXF150 cover disk, I started to install it alongside, intending to bring it into my multi-boot setup fttb.

However, the CentOS installation fails to see the existing partitions on one of my drives.

I have three HDs: two older smallish IDEs and a big SATA. Each one is divided into 4 primary partitions. I have freed up some partitions for the CentOS installation.

The first partition of the master IDE has DOS (yes!) on VFAT. The next partition is also formatted VFAT but I had freed it up for the CentOS /boot directory and anticipated re-formatting as Ext3 or 4 during the installation. The next is the Linux SWAP and the fourth is unused but formatted Reiserfs.

This master IDE also has the MBR (for which I use Smart Boot Manager, but that has not yet become involved in the installation).

The first partition of the slave IDE has Windows XP on NTFS, the next two are Suse /boot and / on Ext3, and the fourth is Windows data on NTFS.

The big SATA disk's partitions are all Linux data on Reiserfs.

When installing CentOS, and I get to the bit where it asks where you want it installed, it shows the three disks and their partitions, but not the partitions of the Master IDE where I want to put /boot. It shows the whole drive as a single VFAT partition, which in fact is only what the first two partitions are.

Any ideas what is going on?

Incidentally, I found CentOS a bit dumbed down compared with Suse or Ubuntu, suprisingly. I recall that these latter offered a choice of your partitions for every top-level Linux directory. The nearest Centos has got to that is to offer different partions for "System" and "Data". Of course, I have taken the install no further, seeing that it does not understand my existing partions.

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Installing CentOS 6 (Lxf 150)