Ian and All:
Thanks for your interest. On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Ian Bruseker wrote: > First off, if I may be so bold, that is some whacked partitioning you > got going on there. ;-) I rarely get past 5 partitions before I get > confused. 1. Having suffered system crashes in the past I have developed the habit (some would say "fixation") of backing up everything on my machines at least once a month. Data gets the treatment at least once a week. Because my backup medium is a 1Gb Jaz drive. (I bought them before the 2 Gb units were available and writable CDs were economical, and haven't had the spare cash to correct the situation.) I tend to keep my partitions sized under the 1 Gb size so I can make a direct copy of the source drives. (Formal backup and archive programs tend to be far too cumbersome and complex for such a basically simple operation. Also, it's impossible to restore archived files once the system crashes without restoring the system first. But you can't do that because the system is compressed or encoded on media that you can't read until you can get an operating system and the appropriate disencoding/uncompressing software up and running. And you can't do that until you restore the system. And you can't restore the system until you can get the operating system and the appropriate disencoding/uncompressing software up and running. I'm developing a migraine just thinking of the vicious circle!) 2. Keeping track of more than 5 partitions is actually quite easy. That's what disk labels (e.g., EMAIL1, SCRATCH3, /home, /usr) are all about. Computers think with C:, D:, F:, /dev/hda1, /dev/hdb5 (or their digital equivalents) and largely ignore verbose labels except in an attempt to understand mere humans. > Here's my thought on this, which may or may not be valid, but it's a > thought: You've got a 40 GB drive in a P200. Are you sure it really > works completely correctly? Does Windows see all 40 GB? 1. I failed to mention earlier that I was using Seagate's version of Disk Manager to alter the BIOS so that the full 40Gb could be addressed. 2. Window$/DOS can't see ext2 partitions but does see, read and write to all the FAT32 partitions up to the Linux ones. > My first P200 had a 1.7 GB, which I later upgraded to 6.4, and then I > couldn't go beyond that without a BIOS upgrade, and even then I think > the new limit was 32 GB. Your Linux partitions on that drive seem to be > wayyyy near the end. They might be beyond the reach of the bios. The > 2.4 GB hard drive seems to have nothing but Linux on it. Have you tried > installing the entire RedHat installation to that drive, to see if that > works? No. But that is an option that I'll consider if nothing else works. I also failed to mention that earlier I had this exact same version of Linux from the exact same CDs running on the exact same machine with a 10Gb disk instead of the 40Gb. The 10Gb disk crashed, so I got the 40 Gb to replace it. The logical architecture of the drives (10 vs 40 Gb plus 2.4 Gb) is almost identical in both installations. There are several conclusions to be drawn from this: 1. All the hardware other than the 40 Gb disk was running okay before the crash. Because Window$ is still running well (or at least as well as Window$ ever does) and I can still run a brain damaged version of Linux, I can only assume that everything is still okay. Hardware failure is probably not an issue. 2. The most significant change has been the addition of the much larger drive. However, the disk seems to be working properly under Window$ and even partly okay under Linux, and Disk Manager is supposed to take care of that (regardless of the OS) in the first place. Am I being too trusting? 3. Linux can read, write and execute limited files from the high end of the 40Gb disk. The disk isn't inaccessible to Linux, at least the brain damaged version that I can get running. Getting at that part of the big disk doesn't seem to be a problem. One last item: It would appear that, during installation, Linux can write to the root of any given partition but not to subdirectories. For instance, I can see /usr (partition /hda17) but /usr/bin seems to be empty. Peace, health, wisdom and wealth. Live long and prosper. Stan Schultz Techno-Geek wannabe Webpage: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~schultz Home: (403) 230-1911 Work: (403) 220-8570 FAX: (403) 270-8928
