Installing Fedora in Virtual Box #2: Booting the CD and Preparing the Installation.
Part one is here.
In Virtual Box, you can link either to a physical DVD/CD drive and boot from a disk or link to an image of the CD (*.iso) and boot directly from the file. (Note: If you do the latter, you must later unlink from the *.iso file, just as you must remove a disk from a physical boot drive). In this case, I inserted a physical CD and told Virtual Box to start the virtual machine.
Fedora first asked me whether to do a disk check, although I found the wording (“media test”) a bit obscure. Had I been installing to a real hard disk, as opposed to a virtual one, I would performed the test; as it was, I skipped it.
Clarification, 2001-03-17: The wording was so obscure that I complete misunderstood it. It referred to testing the validity of the installation media, in this case, a CD.
Next was a splash screen the purpose of which seemed to be to show that boot-up was completed. I had to click “Next.” After that, Fedora asked me to select a language; I highlighted “English” and clicked “Next.” This was followed by a dialog for selecting the installation media. I chose “Basic Storage Devices.”
Fedora then told me that there was “an error processing the device.” Given that the virtual hard disk was, for all intents and purposes, upartitioned, unformatted space, this made sense, but, once again, I found the wording a little obscure.
I clicked “Re-Initialize.”
The next dialog asked me to name the computer; this being simply Virtual Box testing, I accepted the default suggestion (“localhost.localdomain”) and clicked “Next,” bringing up the Time Zone dialog.
At this point, Fedora prompted for me to create and confirm a password for “root,” the computer administrator, then asked me for the partitioning scheme for the hard drive.
Since I was installing to empty space, I selected “Use All Space” (meaning “use all space on the virtual drive”).
“Shrink Current Space” or “Use Free Space” enables Fedora to automatically set up a dual-boot system with an existing installation; had I selected either of those, I also would have checked “Review and modify partitioning layout,” so I could review the partitioning scheme before allowing Fedora to modify my disk.
Now, Fedora had all in the information it needed to begin the installation. It gave me one more chance to back out:
I forged ahead.
Next: Completing the Installation and Starting the New System.