"Steven T. Hatton" wrote:
Chris Reeves wrote:
Raghavendra R wrote:
I have a Intel P III processor with a 17 GB Seagate hard drive. Ths BIOS recognises this hard disk as one with 33416 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. I want to install Win 95, Win NT and Linux on my hard drive. I ran MS-DOS fdisk program and created a primary partition of 2 GB and the entire remaining portion of the hard disk as an extended partition. I formatted the primary partition as a DOS FAT16 filesystem (C:) and also the starting portion (2 GB) of the extended partition as another DOS FAT 16 filesystem (D:). I want to install NT Workstation from 4 GB till 10 GB by creating a NTFS filesystem for that portion. Finally, i would like to install Suse Linux 6.3 on the remaining 6.5 GB of the hard disk.
I have a few doubts on my mind. Can i install Linux on the last 6 GB of my 17 GB har disk?? I heard that Linux should be installed on the first 8 GB of the hard disk or the first 1024 cylinders of my hard disk. Is it true?? Also, should i always repartition the hard drive thro' Linux yast before installation??. Please advise.
Linux will have no problems with being on the last part of the drive. The only thing to watch out for is that the /boot directory has to be below the 1024th cylinder. This is usually accomplished by making a separate, small (about 7MB), /boot partition at the start of the drive. If I was you, I'd redo the partitioning, inserting a small /boot partition at the start, like this:
/dev/hda1 7M /boot /dev/hda2 2G c: /dev/hda3 15GB <extended> /dev/hda5 2G d: /dev/hda6 6G NTFS drive /dev/hda... 6.5G Linux partitions
I'm not going to go into how you should split up your Linux partitions as that is a heavily debated question.
There is no need to create your Linux partitions specifically with Linux fdisk, although DOS fdisk won't be much use to you here. For partitioning, I would either recommend Linux fdisk for the whole lot (can be used through YaST), or one of the more recent versions of Partition Magic.
If you install Linux before one of those MS OSes, then make sure you make a boot disk, as they have an annoying tendency to overwrite your MBR...
How is one to get more than four partitions on the HD? I have a HD with an extended partition and logical partitions on it. It's formatted NTFS, and Linux can't see it. As far as I know you can't create more than four primary partitions on a HD with your typical intel based system. I do this with sparc systems all the time, but I have always stopped at four with intel systems. Sure you can use extended partitions, but that gets messy, and I start to wonder to what end you would do such a thing.
The above does use an extended partition - /dev/hda5 onwards are logical partitions inside the extended partition. The four partition limit comes about due to the fact that the partition table on Intel type boxes is only big enough to hold four partitions. The purpose of the extended partition was to get around this limit by using one of the primary partitions to point to another 'partition table' at the start of the extended partition, which can hold many more partitions itself. I can't really see why you call this messy, as it enables people like myself to run multiple operating systems, and to split their Linux directory structure into many partitions, making the system more robust. When creating your Linux directory structure, it is often a good idea to have separate partitions for /boot, /var, /usr, /home, /, and possibly also /opt and /tmp. The reasons are as follows: /boot at the start of the drive, to make sure you boot files are below cylinder 1024 /var keep separate so that log files can't fill up your root partition and bring you to a halt /usr no particular reason, but it's a large, frequently accessed, structure in itself, mainly performance reasons /home for ease of upgrading, so you don't lose your files by accident / ummm - obvious? {/opt this sometimes has a few huge, often commercial, programs} {/tmp stops temp files filling up the / partition} Doing your Linux partitioning this way means that you *need* an extended partition, especially when you take into account the swap partition, and maybe a couple of partitions for other OSes. For the benefit of Raghavendra R: LILO will boot all the operating systems you're looking at, including NT and '95. My only worry about the partition scheme mentioned above, looking at it a second time around, was that I'm not totally sure whether NT can cope with its main partition being a logical partition. Hope that clears things up a bit... ;-) Chris -- __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- 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/