Richard Sobey wrote:

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And my last question - will there be any problem with my HD. It's a Maxtor Diamond Max 5Gb (just bought it a few days ago) and I'm having to use the EZ-BIOS that comes with it, since my BIOS doesn't support disks > 2Gb. Do you think it'll be okay?

Do you mean the fact that FAT isn't efficient with cluster sizes? If so, I'm not bothered about that. Win95 will be for games only, and efficiency isn't the prime concern! FAT32 would have been nice, but I need to see it under NT as well.

No, I mean that fat partitions are limited to 2 gigs, and more importantly you are limited to a 520 meg primary C partion. Of course, you will have alot of slackspace with those cluster sizes. You'll probably lose 15 percent of your disk.

<snip partitioning suggestions>

Could I just get a copy of Partition Magic, for instance, and divide up that 1Gb partition into 2 (1x 950 and 1 x 50)? Oh, forgot - I have to disable EZ-BIOS. But - the bit of paper that came with the HD said that disabling the EZ-BIOS would render the disk unbootable. True?

No, you can boot without ez-bios; BUT the first primary partition has to be less than 528 megs, and win95 has to go in there. Then you can add 3 more 2 gig primaries, or 2 primaries and an extended dos. But they will not be bootable WITH THE BIOS! NT can be booted from any partition because it puts it's Boot loader on c:\; it's called ntldr. But C has to be less than 528 megs. Linux can be booted from anywhere as long as lilo is on the MBR. There is a good explanation on page 138 of the Suse Manual. The key is that the c partition must be less than 528. EZ-BIOS just lets you make your C partition any size you want, but it messes up Linux. You don't need Partition Magic. Dos's fdisk and linux's fdisk both work fine. Partition Magic can come in handy if you want to resize, or move partitions after they have data in them. But if you are starting from scratch, it does you no good.

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With all those different os'es, you should probably look into System Commander, although lilo can always be made to work.

I'll have a look.. although I'd prefer not to have to buy a third-party solution. (Partition Magic would be the exception).

Yeah, you don't need to buy anything. Fdisk and lilo work just fine. -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e