Question. Now if I format would I still need Parted Magic? Or can I partition from inside Tiny Core?
A minimalist tool to undertake partitioning is included in the TC ISO (i.e. 'fdisk'), but you better know what you are doing with that one. A slightly more user friendly tool (i.e. 'cfdisk') is the recommended one in the
installation instructions. The TC repository also contains 'gparted.tcz', a GTK2-based GUI app (install e.g. via
tce-load -wi gparted and executed via
sudo gparted). But this requires with all it's dependencies ca. 10 MBytes download.
But with all those tools (even the GUI ones): if you have not got a clue what you are doing you always risk to do some damage (e.g. delete a file system you did not want to loose).
If you already have a working Linux installation you also have the option to "integrate" TC into the existing Linux filesystem. This is often called a "hybrid installation" (might be worth searching for this term in this forum here).
The principle steps for such a kind of installation would be:
- copy the TC kernel (i.e. 'bzImage') and initrd (i.e. 'tinycore.gz') to a directory (e.g. '/boot'),
- amend the configuration of the already existing boot manager with a stanza for TC (not really any different to a boot manager stanza for TC if you would install TC on it's own),
- create a 'tce' directory in the root directory of the already existing Linux file system (this should be "automagically" found by TC during the boot process and used for extension storage and backup).
There are more advanced variations to such a type of installation (e.g. "persistent home", or not-default directory names for 'tce') but those simple steps should be enough to get the ball rolling, and would not require any parttioning, formatting or 'GRUB' installation. This type of installtion just requires enough free disk space (for the extensions) in additon to the ca. 11 MB for the Core.