No Partition Linux Install

The purpose of this site is to introduce Windows users to the fun of Linux without the trauma of risking their existing system. This page gives you the basic instructions for installing Linux to your Hard Drive, but without partitioning the drive to do it, and assumes you are currently running Windows. They do this by invoking vmlinux.

Installing No-Partition Linux:

  1) Make sure you have 2 Gig of Hard Drive space free.The average Partitionless Linux install tells you it needs about 1 Gig. They forget to mention the 200 Meg for the compressed download, and the 500 Meg it needs to uncompress itself in order to run the install. After installing, you can recover the hard drive space by deleting the Temp files and original download.

  2) Run a thorough ScanDisk on your system.

  3) Run a Disk Defrag on your system.

After these 3 steps, your Windoze box is ready to install a Partitionless Linux system.

  4) Install Linux on your hard drive. It will live in it's own directory under Windoze, C:\Linux for WinLinux, C:\Phat for PhatLinux.

Once you have installed Linux, power down, and reboot the system. WinLinux will install a LILO boot manager if you made that selection, so you can choose on bootup wether to run Linux or Windows. It also has an icon and shortcut to allow you to launch it from inside Windows. To launch PhatLinux, reboot to DOS, change directories to c:\Phat, and run linux.bat from the DOS prompt. This is, of course, the short version. For detailed instructions, help with specific hardware, support forums or mailing lists, see the distributions web site.

You can install and configure any other Linux programs using the Package Manager you will find in the menu of each build. Because WinLinux is a partitionless build of RedHat, and PhatLinux is partitionless Mandrake, you can install any software for those builds in the appropriate Linux install.