On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, juergen.braukmann@ruhr-west.de wrote:
I also wonder wether the linux boot partition could be MSDOS formatted, as Warrl et al. nicely described the stuff needed for booting is handled by the BIOS (read: the bootsector stores absolute pointers to absolute disk sectors to collect the stuff for booting, this is filesystem independent. You need sort of FS support to store it there, but not for booting) This could "save" a partition. I do not feel happy about probable MS internal incompatibilities (FAT32 / NTFS - WinXX / WinNT) that come with that problem No Windows here, I cant test.
The Linux boot partition *can* be MSDOS formatted BUT - it needs a bunch of special software. In addition, booting to MS-DOS version 7 (Windows 95) and then into Linux must be arranged very carefully overriding a bunch of the MS-DOS defaults - otherwise you are essentially crashing Windows 95 every time you go into Linux. And, having overridden the defaults, you then have to manually code to use them when booting into Windows 95. And they aren't well-documented, and I don't remember them. (You might look for the Win95NetBugs FAQ or the Windows95 Annoyances page, I think they are listed in one or the other or maybe both of those places.) Oh, and you lose most of the flexibility of lilo - either that or, every time you defrag your MSDOS disk space, you have to boot Linux from a recovery disk and rerun lilo. Really, it's much easier and safer to carve out 4 meg for a Linux boot partition and format it with EXT2. And what's so important about saving a partition? You can have up to three primary and something like 17 secondary on an IDE drive. -- 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/