Supersonic^

My hard drive partitions are as follows:

HDD1 - Primary Master
Boot (C:) 15GB (System) NTFS
Documents (D:) 117GB NTFS
Misc (F:) 54GB NTFS

HDD2 - Primary Slave
39GB Unformatted (reserved for Linux)
73GB Games (E:) NTFS

My problem: I want to install FC4 on the 39GB of unformatted partition, but it won't let me install on a non-boot partition. Are there any ways around this?

Diamon

Are you letting int installer automatically layout the drive or doing it manually? I haven't used Fedora since FC2 but I think all you need is the bootable flag set on the partition.

Supersonic^

I tried both methods and both didn't work.

Luna

You will need some kind of boot loader on the main drive to point it to each OS, so I would guess not unless you can get it to Install a boot loader. Even then I've never tried a dual boot with two drives before but I don't see why it would not work. In Gentoo I could specify which HD and partition I wanted it to load each OS on.

Something like Lilo should be fine. I forgot the default one for Gentoo.

Are you using a modified Windows script for the boot?

Supersonic^

As far as I'm concerned I need to get the thing installed before I can worry about boot loaders. That just isn't happening..

Guitarfreak

You could ask on that site i posted mate.. They might know.. Im crap when it comes to boot sectors and that.. I got a harddrive prob myself at the mo. Flamin things

Luna

Yea how did I miss that.

Hmm, in that case I'm not sure. Sounds like a dumb Idea to prohibit such a thing.

Kind of a tricky situation. You could resize your partitions on the main drive and install it on there but that kind of sucks. You would have to use partition magic or something to do that without erasing your data.

Nothing else really comes to mind as I've never used FC before.

Guitarfreak

I used that partion magic the other week.. Ended up havin to reinstall windows

eramnes

This sounds strangely like my setup. Mine is like this:
IDE Drive 1:
Windows XP Pro SP2 = C:\ - 5GB
Games = D:\ - 25GB
Misc. = E:\ - 10GB

IDE Drive 2:
Fedora Core 3 = 40GB

Here's what I did to get it to work. I know you said you already tried this, but sometimes it can be tricky. Not insulting your intelligence or anything, I'm just going to try to lay it out exactly the way I did it. Also, I know it's not Core 4, but it should be close to the same steps.

When it comes to the installation step for partitioning, choose to manually partition. Create a new partition named "/boot", without the quotes. I always make mine 8MB, but for some reason it always chooses 128MB for me after I put it in. You'll need to edit this new partition and choose the "Bootable" flag for it. It's a numerical value, 83 IIRC, but I probably don't. It will give you a list of available options for that partition, just read through them and you're bound to find it. It's 2 pages long though. Type in "83", without the quotes, for the type, or whatever the number is and hit "Enter". Now this partition you have created is marked as being bootable.

Next, create a partition called "/swap", without the quotes. Make it 1.5 times the size of your physical RAM. For example, my /swap is 1152 MB, because I have 768MB of RAM. Once again, you'll need to change the flag of this partion to "Linux Swap". The number is 82, I'm almost sure of this one. So just type in "82", without the quotes, and hit "Enter".

Now you have a couple options. You can dedicate all the leftover space to your / partition, or you can make separate ones for /home, /var, etc. I am lazy, so I just left all the space as one big / partition. This one should be ext3 by default, but make sure before you move on that it is ext3.

Now, it should move on to the screen where you can choose a boot loader. For Core 3, the default was GRUB. I just stuck with that, although LILO is easier to configure, IMO. You should see a little scroll box with OS options in it, if you're using the graphical install. Look and see what ones are there, to make sure that the ones you want are going to be in the boot menu. Choose what one you want to be default, and you should be on with the install.

Let me know if this works, or if I am a complete idiot for writing out the same thing you already tried.