quite happy to buy Partition Magic 5 if it's going to make life easier for me. depends on what you are going to do. I have it here and it was great for dividing an existing Windows 95 system up so that I could have separate partitions for 95, NT and Linux. I guess if you are installing on an empty system, you wouldn't need PM. I see that one

David Hamilton wrote: person suggested PM4 was better but that had its own problems which I hope are corrected in PM5. I have PM5 and haven't found any problems yet Damon Register -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/

David Hamilton wrote:

I've just ordered Suse Linux 6.4 and I will be a first time Linux user. I'm quite happy to buy Partition Magic 5 if it's going to make life easier for me. I'd like to read some documentation on Linux Fdisk before I do though. Because I currently haven't got Linux, I can't read tarred and gzipped files ... and this is all I can find concerning Fdisk.

Does anyone know where I can get the Linux Fdisk documentation in a format (html, txt, zipped) that I can read please? Or could someone email it to me please?

Thanks.

David Hamilton Only I give the right to read what I write and PGP allows me to make that choice. Use PGP now.

I have used Partition Magic, Versions 2, 3, and 4, very successfully to partition and to multiboot various combinations of four different distributions of Linux, OS/2, Windows 95, Windows95 OSR2, and Windows 98. No problems were encountered in repartitioning on the fly or in using the boot managers. (The boot managers shipped with these three versions differed from one another.) I especially like the way it gives total control over size and placement of each partition. However, recently I opted to try System Commander 2000 to perform this task on a late-model Compaq. This was primarily motivated by the fact that at the time I made the purchase, System Commander claimed full compatibility with Windows 2000. Indeed, Partition Magic Version 2 included a special version of System Commander as its boot manager. The target machine is also used by a naive computer user whom I did not wish to burden with learning to use lilo or the boot manager included with Windows 2000. Now V-Systems (System Commander) and PowerQuest are competing for both the partitioning utility and the boot manager utility. I now believe that Partition Magic does support Windows 2000, so that the reason for choosing it over Partition Magic has probably gone away. But System Commander 2000 has given me no reason to regret my selection. System Commmander too has performed in full accordance with my expectations. It was used to set up the arrangement described below, copied from a previous posting to this list. The format program supplied with each OS was used for formatting after System Commander did the partitioning. Sytstem Commander also takes full control over the booting process. --------Previous posting: Cheedu wrote:

hello

I am a sort of a newbie to suse 6.3. I was a redhat user. If you don't mind , can you help me with a slight problem during installation.

i want to know how i can specify the sizes of / ,/boot,/home partitions during installation. My disk geometry being what it is , my hard disk has more than 1024 cylinders. Disk Druid in RHL says its 1027 but yast says its around 2337. So the /boot in suse somehow manages to come after the 1500th cylinder. So lilo won't work properly. Moreover, my hard-disk is not contigous. Repeated formatting and resizing of partitions are to be blamed, i suppose. Any idea how i can continue? Even documentation on the web would be nice.

Cheers Cheedu

I have partitioned a 30 GB IDE drive for use as a secondary drive in a system having a 10 GB primary drive. The system is set up for triple-booting among Linux (SuSE 6.3), Windows 2000, and Windows 98 SE. On the secondary drive, Cylinder 0 is a single-cylinder partition formatted as ext2 upon which /boot is mounted. On my system, that corresponds to 7 MB, way more than adequate for /boot. Then there follows an extended partition (beginning at cylinder 1, naturally) occupying about 20 GB. This is followed by a primary partition containing 120 MB or so, designated and formatted as Linux swap. Then fourth and final partition on the drive is a primary partition of about 10 GB formatted as ext2, upon which / is mounted. I have chosen not to have separate partitions for /usr, /home, or /var, as is sometimes recommended. Except for /boot and the swap partition, everything Linux is contained on this, the last partition on the secondary drive. The extended partition contains some FAT32 file systems and an NTFS file system. The primary drive contains FAT 32 file systems. The MBR of the primary drive contains a boot record for System Commander. System Commander is set up to point to and select among: A) the first partition on the primary drive (where WIN 98 is installed); B) the logical partition containing NTFS within the extended partition on the secondary drive (where WIN 2000 is installed); and C) the last primary partition on the secondary drive (where Linux is installed). The Linux root partition (/), mounted upon /dev/hdb4, begins about Cylinder 2900 and extends to about Cylinder 3700. Although the boot machinery contained in /boot must be located below Cylinder 1024, no such requirement is placed on anything else in Linux. I used System Commander to set the size, order, and type of each partition. (I have little doubt that Partition Magic would have done as well.) The partitioning was verified using the fdisk program supplied with each of the three operating systems. Each partition was formatted using the formatting program of its target OS. No problems have been encountered. Linux can see every ext2, NTFS, and FAT32 partition. WIN 2000 can see every NTFS and FAT32 partition. Win 98 can see every FAT32 partition. And, though it is completely irrelevant to Linux, Windows 2000 uses exactly the same letter to designate every logical drive as does Windows 98. I deplore Disk Druid from Red Hat. Or at least I deplore Red Hat's failure to deal with a bug that I reported to them last August, along with a possible explanation and a suggested work-around. Three different persons have been appointed to follow up on it. All have acknowledged the assignment. None has ever asked a question, made a suggestion, or indicated that they have given any thought to the matter whatsoever. The bug report is still open. I eventually gave up on Disk Druid and reinstalled. The Red Hat disti was purged and SuSE ver 6.3 was installed from scratch. That installation is on a laptop; lilo does the booting and boot selection on it. ----------end of previous posting -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/