[pilauh]

Hi,

I have a 20 GB drive on my ibook.. it is partion that way :

OS X : 6GB
Storage 10GB
free : 4GB

I thought i wsa able to install YDL directly on the "free" partition without having to reformat everything...

Is it a correct assomption or am i wrong ?

Help needed please ?

[undotwa]

ok this is iStinky Udder, my brother is undotwa, im just posting under his name cause I cant be bothered registering here (I sometimes read the forums), anyway, 4 gigs should be fine for YDL, and no you dont technically have to repartition it, but I would recomend it, that way it keeps all your stuff seperate and allows you to have swap space, I would split the 4gb of free space into 3 partitions,

root (mount point: /) 2gigs
swap (mount point: /swap [/swap1 swap2 etc should be used if you want more than one swap partition] generally with swap partitions you use double your ram up to 128 megs, so basically with todays amounts of memory you should just use a 128mb swap partition
home (mount point: /home) the rest of the drive

- stinks

[undotwa]

me again,

just want to point out that I am unaware of any partitioning software that lets you partition partitions, ie to make the the above setup you are going to have to erase the whole drive...

- stinks

[Adam E]

I had the same questions a couple months ago---I had 3/2/25 partitions and wanted to put YDL 2.1 on the 3.

Luckily, you don't need to scrap the entire drive--within the YDL installer you can select a partition and erase it--then reformat with root/swap and everything else linux needs. Just make sure you select the right partition to erase.

[pilauh]

ok...
to be more specific : on the YDL site it is mentionned that when you partition with Mac OS installer (Disk Utils) yo have to choose the "unalocated" format for the future Linux partition...

in my case the "free" part where I want to install YDL is already in HFS+, will I be able to erase and use that specific fotmat (unalocated) ?

thanks for all your help and advises...

[malvolio]

I'm stuck on a Dell at work right now, so I can't double-check this, but I believe that one of the options that Disk Utility gives you when you erase a partition is to make it just "empty space." The other options are HFS, HFS+, and UFS.
Seems logical that "empty space" and "unallocated" would mean the same thing, but I don't offer any guarantees.

[Adam E]

You don't need to make space 'unallocated' with Disk Utility to install YDL. You can 'unallocate' a partition created by Disk Utility from within the installer--that's what I meant.

I forget the actual steps I used, but I'm sure it was near the beginning of the installer and fairly straightforward if you know what you're looking for. Basically YDL lists all your partitions--there will be your big ones plus little ~11k stuff. If you can identify which partition it is you want to erase based on its size (YDL doesn't recognize the names you gave them through Mac OS), you can just erase the partition and it will become unallocated.

Then you can create your YDL partitions from this unallocated space.

Hope this helps.