On Sun, 23 Apr 2000, 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.
Facts first: The stuff that lilo - the usualy Linux boot loader - reads, must reside in cylinders 0 to 1023 of one of the first two drives in your system. That's why a /boot partition is commonly recommended (and is installed automatically if you use YAST2). Based on what I see on my machine, this partition needs to have at least 1 megabyte of space, but allow for absurdity and give it 4 to 8. Aside from that, Linux simply does not care where it is (although moving it is a bit of a challenge). It can be on cylinder 3000 of the 5th drive of your 3rd SCSI chain, no problem. This restriction exists because the lilo boot loader, which runs BEFORE Linux is loaded, uses the BIOS disk I/O routines to load the Linux kernel, and those routines in the form lilo uses them (which works on old 386 machines as well as the new stuff) can only handle cylinder numbers from 0 to 1,023. Once the Linux kernel is loaded, the BIOS is ignored and the kernel can go anywhere. Now, as for your 2-gig FAT16 partitions: Find a source of a bunch of files of typical size and copy them to one of these partitions repeatedly (multiple directories or something) until the drive fills up. Next create a 995-meg FAT16 partition and format it, and copy all the files from the 2-gig partition to it. No surprise, they won't all fit. Find out how many files are on each of the two partitions. Surprise: they ALMOST all fit. You probably lost between 1% and 5%. Ask yourself if you're willing to use up 1000 megabytes of disk space in order to store 10 to 50 megabytes of files. FAT16 slack space is THAT BAD. The smallest chunk of space it can allocate (aka the cluster size) on a drive of 1 to 2 gigs, is 32 kilobytes. However, a large majority of typical Windows user and system files are 16 kilobytes OR LESS, meaning that over half the space allocated to these files is used for NOTHING. Shrink the partition size under a threshold which is a few meg shy of 1 gig, and the cluster size drops to 16K. If you were to cut the partition size under 500 megabytes, the cluster size would drop to 8K and space would be used even more efficiently, but at 16K cluster size it isn't really horrible. Your given disk architecture has 504 kilobytes per cylinder, or about 512 megabytes in the first 1,024 cylinders. Now, there are some things you need to know about the NT bootloader that I can't tell you - because I don't know them. Does IT require anything in particular to be in any particular part of the disk? If so, factor that into the following. I'll assume it doesn't. Partition table: Set up an extended partition occupying the entire disk. Within it, allocate as follows using linux fdisk: (5) 6 megabytes ext2 Save that and get out of this install process. Start the Windows 95 install process. If it asks you about support for large hard disks, say no (it's talking about FAT32 which would be good, except NT 4.0 can't speak that language). Allocate more partitions: 990 megabytes DOS 990 megabytes DOS Complete this install. Now start a Linux install. Allocate additional space as follows: (8) 120 megabytes swap (9) 7 gigabytes ext2 Map partitions as follows: 5 is /boot, 9 is / (Purists will recommend a multi-partition install of Linux, and for a server in steady use in a multi-user network I'd agree In fact I have six partitions on a 7.6-gig disk in the system I'm running right now. Servers in steady use don't have multiple OSes installed. It's a complexity you don't necessarily need right now, particularly if you are new to this stuff.) Complete this install. Have lilo write to the boot sector of the root partition AND to floppy (you may have to do one of these manually: "man lilo" and "man lilo.conf" for details). That floppy will be useful if things go not quite right. Now install Windows NT. Select appropriate options to NOT overwrite your Windows 95 install. Let it have the rest of the disk. Talk to its bootloader about providing you options for Windows 95 and for Linux/lilo (boot sector of partition 9). You'll have to read the NT documentation on how to do that. -- 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/