Warrl wrote:
On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, 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.
SuSE 6.3 has two installation utilities: YAST2 on disk 1, and YAST on disk 2. YAST2 is the easier of the two, but YAST is by far more flexible and can do what you need.
Set up one partition, entirely within the first 1,024 cylinders, that is at least 4 megabytes. Ten megabytes is substantially more than you need. This will be your /boot partition. This is the ONLY part of the whole install that normally is location-critical.
IF you are going to put lilo in the boot sector of the root partition (which is necessary if you want to put Windows NT/2000 on the same drive, I believe), then you may have to have the root partition begin no later than cylinder 1023. But where the end is, probably would not matter. And if you put lilo in the disk's master boot record (for a linux-only system or for dual-booting with Windows 9X or other version of MS-DOS), then you don't have this issue because the MBR is always early.
Aside from that, the cylinder number doesn't matter. Linux, once it's booted, ignores the BIOS disk routines and doesn't have their limitations. Just don't try to have a single ext2 partition of more than four terabytes. :-)
However, for performance reasons, you want your SWAP partition as early on the disk as possible. Your system will run just fine if you have a 128-meg swap partition ending in cylinder 2336. But it will run faster if the swap partition is early on the disk.
Why is this? It seems to me that the swap partition should be as close to the ext2 partition(s) as possible, to avoid unnecessary seek distances. Does Linux need to reaccess the partition table to find the swap partition frequently? I can't think of any other reason to locate the swap partition early on the disk. Dick Delp <dickdelp@jps.net> -- 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/