EX200 Red Hat Certified System Administrator RHCSA – Installing Red Hat or CentOS with a dual boot approach on Windows 8

1. How to dual boot Red Hat and windows 8 part 1.

Welcome back everybody. Today I am just going to show you that the VirtualBox guest editions have indeed installed and the machine has indeed booted. So here it is, red Hat virtual machine. I have switched it to full screen mode. If I just go ahead and take this. There we go. It says view here. I can switch it to full screen if I wish to do so. So you don’t see any of the differences. So you don’t CD virtual box lines and toolbar. Anyway, let me just go ahead and minimize it a little bit the first time when you boot it up like this. When you log in. What I’ve noticed and what I’ve noticed with my previous virtual machines is that the virtual box guest editions don’t load up immediately. So log in, wait maybe 15 seconds, a bit more, maybe 20, something like that for them to load. Try resizing your screen like this. Pretty sure that doesn’t have that much effect. But something seems to be reloading in the background and it does help out the way I’ve noticed it. Apparently here it has broke. I have broken something. Have I indeed broken something? No, I haven’t. It does work. Perhaps the screen just blanked out or something like that. I could not switch the monitor configuration. Okay, so this is not a big deal here. Anyway, as I said, just try resizing the screen, wait for about 20 seconds or so and the VirtualBox guest editions will inevitably load or should load anyway.

Now in this tutorial, what I wanted to do with you is show you how you can actually perform a dual boot of Windows 8. 1 and Red Hat. Now this is only valid for Windows 8. 1 and Windows Eight. You’re not going to have such difficulties with Windows Seven or Vista or XP or anything of a kind if you by any chance happen to have any of those operating systems. And if you wish to perform a dual boot please do post it in discussions. I will be more than happy to help you out and to give you detailed instructions on how to do that as that is a lot simpler. But the procedure is pretty much the same anyway. So as I said, I will show you three ways how you can set up your environment. One I have already shown to you how to use VirtualBox and how to install it. The second one will be how to perform a dual boot between Windows 8. 1 and Red Hat. And the third one we will do way later on when I show you the virtualization process, the one that I talked about where you get 95% native performance with Xen.

I do not want to get into that with you now. Primarily because I wish to go over the graphical user interface of Linux Red Hat and I wish to introduce you to the Linux command line and a few other things before we actually get into that because that is a bit complicated and there are a lot of new stuff there. So I’m just afraid that a lot of people won’t be able to follow it through. So for the time being, let’s stick to the basics and we will later on move on to the more advanced stuff. Anyway, I’m just going to go ahead and minimize this machine. So this is my Windows 8. 1 machine. Let me just go ahead and boot it up and yes, there we go. So it is booting, no problems, hopefully. There we go. I thought I forgot the CD inside or something of a kind, but no indeed, Windows 8. 1 should boot up. I don’t know. The boot process for Windows is fairly slow from what I’ve seen, but doesn’t really matter. I’m going to try assigning more resources to this machine because I’m going to see it.

Oh, I didn’t actually do this the proper way. See advanced, continue. You shouldn’t actually see this. But anyway, I seem to have been messing around with the machine a little bit, so to say, and it’s offering me to actually perform a repair, but I don’t really need a repair. It’s going to boot up, no problems now anyway, I am doing the demonstration in VirtualBox, of course, in a virtualized environment, but the procedure is exactly the same with the real machines. Although there is a downside to this. For this particular method you will require two hard drives and this is basically a foolproof method that will work on pretty much any device out there, as opposed to some other methods where you do it in a single drive and then encounter a ton load of problems. Because I’ve seen so many people complain on so many forums out there how Windows 8. 1 doesn’t play well with other operating systems at all. So I’ve decided against showing you other methods, primarily because a lot of problems were experienced by a lot of people using those methods. So I just figured I would show you the foolproof one, the one that is safe, the one that leaves you with the lowest chance of messing anything up. Anyway, so this is my Windows 8. 1 machine. It is up and running.

So this would be an equivalent of your physical machine and I’m just going to go ahead and power it off for the time being because I don’t really need it or want it at a time I wish to install another one as before. So just shut it down and as before, you will of course need an ISO file of the operating system, which you will burn to a CD. Once you have burned it to a CD, just insert the CD into your machine and boot from it. Here’s how you do it. So on a virtual box, I’ll of course use virtual things in a virtualized environment. But basically you see the one that I’ve selected now, it says Controller IDE. It says here empty. Now if I just select where is it? There we go. If I just selected, it’s an equivalent of you inserting a CD. When I selected this ISO file, it’s an equivalent of you inserting an installation CD into your machine and running the installation from there. Anyway, I’m just going to click here, okay. And your systems should be configured by default to boot from a CD.

So you don’t have to worry about that. If they are not, it’s going to be written in the bottom right corner anyway. It’s going to be written there anyway. Like press F Twelve or Dell or F Two or something of a kind to get the boot configuration or boot setup running. And once you actually press one of those buttons, it gives you an option like would you like to boot from a CD? Would you like to boot from a hard drive? From a USB or from network. Just use up and down arrow keys to select the one that you want and press Enter. That is literally all you need to do. I in the virtualized environment actually needed to do what I just did. Now there is another thing that I will do here that you do not need to do in the real world. You see, I have actually created a virtual hard drive. Another one. So you do need two hard drives. See, one I have named Windows 8. 1 and another one is Red Hat VDI. Anyway, if you are doing this by any chance, if you’re curious, or if you want to do this in the virtual box, you just press sorry not to add a CD or DVD device, add a hard drive.

There you go. And then you can say create a new disk or choose an existing disk. If you say create a new disk, it takes you through this process. You just basically click Next, lock the size, change the name and click Create. That is literally all. And it will create it. And we’ll create one just like this one if you named it so as well. Anyway, not that important at all for you because you’ll be running this on a physical machine. This is a process for a physical machine. So dual booting Windows 8. 1 and Red Hat on two hard drives. Anyway, just go ahead and power on the machine now that the CD has been previously inserted before the restart. And there we go. We are immediately prompted for an option to actually install RedHat Enterprise. We can just go ahead and select it. That’s the first option, not the default window because it first offers a testing of a media. You can run this test if you want as well, but I don’t think that there is that much of a need.

The burning software today is relatively good and performs a lot of checkups itself and the installation process is in route. I’m not going to go through it in great detail, as I have shown it to you already before. But there is one segment which I do wish to show you and which I do wish to explain further. So to say that would be the partitioning plate. That would be the partitioning. It is okay to select the automatic partitioning scheme if you are using a single operating system or if you’re just installing it onto an empty drive in a virtualized environment, something of a kind, it can be a quick workaround. Once what you really want to do is be able to partition it yourself during the installation procedure as well. That can be very, very nice. Primarily because you can do whatever you want with it.

You can create a scheme that will suit your needs, that will benefit you, that you have deemed appropriate to yourself. Now, we have one disk here. It says at a box or disk. This is where the Windows is located physically. You can see it says only 3000 free space. Right next to it I have a hard disk. It says almost 100. I’ve already ran an installation on this. But you can see it says here SDA and SDB. And then you have the amount of space that is free on it. Anyway, they’re about 100 gigs. I’m sure that on your machine they won’t be exactly 100 gigs. Each one of them make sure to first figure out which disk you want to use. So if your Windows is installed on one disk, don’t install it there, install it on another disk. I’m not talking about partitions here. I’m talking about two separate hard drives that are within your machine. So just go ahead and select the one that you have chosen. It’s not empty. There is something on it. I don’t know some things that I have previously installed, but doesn’t really matter.

I’m just going to go ahead and select it. Please be very careful also when doing this. Because if you format the drive, you’re going to lose information, that you’re going to lose data. You’re not going to be able to recover it to the fullest of extent. Some of it you will be able to retrieve. But this is not Windows partitioning or something like that. Once you delete things with Linux, it’s rather difficult to restore them. Even when I delete something in my terminal with an RM command, it’s gone. You just learn to live with it anyway. So, as I said once again, I can’t emphasize this enough. Please select the proper hard disk. If you have problems selecting the proper hard drive, feel free to post it in the discussions. I will be more than happy to help you out with it.

But please do not just randomly click on stuff and delete lose your data. Anyway, to select the drive, all you need to do is click on it and this mark appears. You see this one? It appears now. And then when I click on it, it disappears. Excellent. So I have selected the second drive and I want to select I will configure partitioning that option. Excellent. So now we click on Done and we’re going to be thrown here where we are given an opportunity to actually set it up ourselves. So I already have this and oh, I have already installed Redhead here previously, so let’s just go ahead and delete it all. Since I’m not interested in that now, I wish to do it from scratch so that you can actually see how it is done. So we can have standard partitions, we can have Linux, Volume Manager and some other things as well. But I’m just going to go ahead and select standard partitioning for this.

I could actually even select an LVM. And the first partition that we need to configure is root. Your system files will be located there. So I need to desired capacity, let’s say 20 gigs. So 20GB at Mount Point. Excellent. It is created now I can encrypt it if I wish. You can create volume groups as well because Linux generally, if you have a bunch of disks running under Linux, it just sees them, it can actually see them as a single hard drive. So it treats, I don’t know, two, three, four disks as a single hard drive. No problems. You get that with the default installations of Linux, which is very nice. And if you go back to the root directory in Linux, you will always go back to root. While going back to the root directory on Windows usually means going selecting a disk where it is installed, like C or something like that, and then going there. If this is unclear to you now, I don’t want you to worry about it at all as we move in as we move in deeper and deeper, when I give you clear examples of this, you will understand it far better. Anyway, we have created the root partition and now we need to create a boot partition for our Red Hat. So admount. No, wait.

Okay, so it gave it the automatic size of 81gb because I haven’t assigned any size to it, which is a bit funny. So let’s just go ahead and delete that and let’s create it again. So boot, let’s say, I don’t know, you can probably get away with 100 megs, but I’m just going to say 500 megs to be certain because I don’t know, I guess I’m a cautious guy and I have a lot of space here. Literally, I can have more space than I will probably ever need on this laptop anyway. So boot route and now we need home. So home is not I mean, I don’t think you shouldn’t get any errors, but you should definitely create a home partition. So 80 and yeah, sure, why not? 80GB? I’m pretty sure it’s not going to need a space there. Excellent. Also, you will notice that it doesn’t actually obey me to the fullest of extents. I’ve told it 80 and it has created 74. 51. Anyway, that’s just how it works. So I have a bit of available space left here and I figured, why not? Let’s create a swap partition.

So, swap actually, you don’t need to create it. I think I mentioned this, but it’s not a bad idea to have it. You’re not going to get an error message, but you’re going to get a warning message. Let’s put it so, anyway, I didn’t put in any size parameters, so it just took pretty much all that it could take. There is like 1 MB that’s going to be left there. I suppose you can try tweaking and being extremely precise and trying to extract this 1 MB, but honestly, why bother? Anyway, you can put in a label here. You can name it any way you like as well. No problems there. Swap will only act as usually you put it twice the size of Ram. But I mean, on modern systems, you don’t really need it primarily because you’re not going to run out of Ram generally, but you might. And then your system actually starts using your portion of your hard drive as it would use Ram. It’s a really slow procedure.

The method is terrible, but hey, it saves the day when all is taken into consideration. Anyway, I’m just going to click here. I got home boot route swap. I’m going to say done. And here I get a summary of changes, I get a type and what’s going to be destroyed, what’s going to be created. Just have a look at this and make sure none of these disks are reserved for your Windows. So you can see by SDB if any of them was SDA. Canceled this immediately. But no, they’re all SDB. Excellent. So it’s the second physical hard drive. They’re usually SDB SDA, I think the next one should be SDC and so on and so forth, depending on how many you have. So here it says what’s going to be created, what’s going to be destroyed, what’s going to be formatted, et cetera.

So let’s just go ahead and click on Accept Changes. And there you go. Custom partitioning selected, all is ready, and the installation may actually begin. So you just click on begin installation. I didn’t connect it to the network, but it doesn’t really matter. We can do all the updates and all the things later on that we actually want, since we will need to install some software and performance formed the updates as well. Anyway, I shall leave you here and later on I’ll just show you how the system boots. And what is the difference between how do you actually select to boot into Windows and how do you actually select to boot into Red Hat? Anyway, until then, I bid you farewell.

2. How to dual boot Red Hat and windows 8 part 2.

Welcome back, everybody. Now I’m just going to go ahead and show you that the installation did actually go through as planned. So here is the here’s the machine. And now I’m just going to click on Reboot. This is going to take a bit of time. I will later on to the machine that we’re going to be using as our main operating system, as our Red Hat virtualized environment. I will assign far more resources there. I’ll even assign more CPU cores and more Ram so that it works faster. But for the time being, let’s just see how this works in a bit of a slower mode. So you might have noticed that even though I’ve clicked Reboot at the end of the Red Hat installation, I am booting now into Windows 8. 1. And you might think this to be an error or something of a kind, but I assure you it is not. Everything is working as it should be working. Just type in test. We’ll wait for it. Okay.

Now, Windows is notorious for only seeing the partition of NTFS and Xfut, but let’s just give it a shot anyway to see if we can actually see the Red Hat partitions there. So type in Disk Management, thank you very much. And then I’ll restart the computer and show you that you can indeed boot into Red Hat without any bigger problems. But you need to click a button in time. Okay, so it does see VirtualBox dish one. Okay. Yeah, there we go. So disk zero and disk one, they’re the same size, and it just recognizes these partitions as healthy primary partitions, nothing more. It even sees only two, which is kind of weird, but okay. Anyway, don’t pay that much attention to disk zero, primarily because I’ve done so many wrong things to it up to this point of time. I’m actually even surprised that it’s working properly. What I want to show you here is the disk zero.

And how is it working anyway? If you need to free up some space here in the Disk Management while I’m here, I might as well show you. You can actually shrink these volumes. You shouldn’t mess around with these that are not Windows partitions. You should only mess around with Windows partitions. In windows and Linux. You can mess around with pretty much anything. But let’s just right click on it and there is a delete volume. Shrink volume, okay. So you can right click and shrink it, squaring volume for available shrink space anytime now, my good man, anytime. I don’t know, I’ve already shrink it. So to say something here, and I have partitioned it.

And here excellent. So here it says shrink volume C size available to shrink at megabytes is actually zero because it can’t get any smaller. And the amount of space to shrink in megabytes, you would just put in here. Once that is done, you just read the total size and megabytes after shrink and click shrink. There you go. You can only shrink them from left to right, you cannot shrink them from right to left. So, one thing to keep in mind. Anyway, while I was here, I figured I might as well show you that. Although not particularly relevant for the course, but a bit of extra information is always in handy. Anyway, I just want to show that these two partitions are in fact in existence.

They are very much there, but Windows doesn’t have a clue actually as to what they actually are. So just go ahead and close this, as you would do with your normal machine, with your physical machine. Let’s just restart. And now in the restart process, once the Windows goes down, we will switch to Red Hat. So press F twelve to select the boot device.

You will have something similar in your machine. I don’t know, it depends on which machine. I have a dell. So for dell it’s f twelve. There are some other machines like it’s F two somewhere. It’s actually the delete button. It will be written on the screen as soon as you turn the machine on that first black screen. So don’t worry about it. Just have a look at it and it’s going to say like, this is for BIOS, this is for boot options. Select the one, press the key for boot options and you will get something similar to this. So either you will choose with an up and down arrow and then press Enter or you will have numbers and letters like I have here. So I’m just going to say boot from hard disk two. And there you go. I have Red Hat here standing by. I also have Ubuntu down here, but disregard that please. Been messing around with Windows and been trying to dual booted in a single partition, having countered a lot of problems and didn’t want to burden you with it.

That’s why it actually sees the Ubuntu here. But in any case, disregard that you will not see that when you install it. Rather instead you will only see these two options that I am switching in between. Now. Select the first one, press Enter and very shortly Red Hat will actually boot. So you will have dual boot set up working. No problems as far as I could find on the forums and in consultation with a lot of people on the net who know a great deal about this. And after reviewing a lot of forum posts, as I said before, I’ve actually opted for this method to physically separate Windows and Linux disks. And then you would just select the boot options at machine startup. Safest way to go about things without actually messing up anything. So anyway, accept the license agreement. Done. Finish configuration and it’s going to boot any moment now. Come on.

No, I would like to register a later time because I don’t want to register twice. I’ve already registered on a different machine. So booting into this is the first boot. So keep that in mind. Excellent. There we go. Let’s just log in. I’m not going to bother installing VirtualBox guest editions here, primarily because there is no need to do so, as we’re not actually going to be using this machine. This is only a demonstration of the procedure itself. Come on, anytime now. Just want to show it to you as proof. There you go. So it did indeed boot. You now have the working environment, the graphical user interface here.

And it works, no problems. If you want to switch back to Windows, just reboot the machine, press the key on your keyboard that is appropriate to your computer, to your computer brand, and select the hard drive from which you wish to boot. So one hard drive will be for Windows and another one will be for Red Hat. Very simple procedure, not too complex. And the only thing that you could possibly mess around with, the only possible thing that you could do that would cause you damage, is to actually select the wrong drive during the partitioning part of the installation, and delete the Windows partition.

So just be careful with that and all should go well. In any case, I would like to cut the tutorial here and in the next one we will actually start using Red Hat and I will introduce you to the graphical user interface, not only of Red Hat, but Gnome is the general graphical user interface for Linux distributions. And then we’ll move on slowly into the command line. Anyway, until then, I bid you all farewell.

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