Formatting a hard drive in FAT32/Preparing a partition for Fedora Core 5

[WBBIRL]

I want to install Fedora Core 5 on my 320 GB western digital sata hard drive. It wont install though, because I suspect no partitons are in FAT32 (or anything besides NTFS). But when I go into disk management and right click on my non OS partition (about a 100GB partition) and go to reformat my only option is NTFS???? Any ideas??

The hard drive has two partitions... one is 199GB and the other is 98GB. Currently they are both NTFS and Windows XP PRO resides on the 199GB active partition.

I've used linux before, but im kind of green with most of it. Last time I had partition magic set up the partition for use with linux, but I cant use partition magic anymore.

[Prenim]

You can't format it for Linux from within Windows. You have to boot from the Fedora CD and tell it which partition to use. Then you're going to have to modify your MBR to allow dual booting. There really is documentation for this on the web. I avoid Linux at all costs so I can't help much more.

[WBBIRL]

Well im past that issue and now on to another one.

I formatted a 90GB partition into EXT3 for linux to reside on and made it a (/) dir.

I formatted a 10GB swap partition for linux to use.

Linux installed but I was trying to get it so that grub didnt overwrite my MBR for windows. Little did I know that in order to do what I wanted I should have made a fat 32 partition so that I could output my fedora boot image onto it and then load it into windows that way I could use windows boot manager incase I wanted to get rid of linux.

Now I cant get into linux, but its installed. Instead of writing grub to the MBR I put it on the first sector of the boot partition like this guide told me to do.

http://phoenix.calpoly.edu/~kvoelker.../dual-boot.cgi

So how do I get grub working, because I cannot get into linux to get that boot image out. I have no floppy drive, no fat32 file and I dont think FC5 comes with software to burn CDs or DVDs. So im lost on how I get this boot image now.

I think I may be looking at a start from scratch, but atleast this time I know what to do that I didnt last time.

[shootermcgavin7]

You can burn CDs from Fedora Core. You can do it straight from KDE or GNOME (by using burn:///) and there is also X-CD-Roast (which I prefer) that is included with FC.

I'd just make a boot disc.

[method115]

thier should be an option when setting up fedora to let you fix the MBR. I use Suse Linux though so it might be diffrent in Fedora, but yes you could also just make a boot cd/disk.

[dynamo]

why not just adjust the config file to add windows to the boot list and write the new MBR? windows is there just needs to be called. shouldn't be too difficult, just look up the grub howto.