On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 10:18:16PM -0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-> Hi all.
->
-> Last week i bought a box with w98 preloaded. Without thinking
-> about it, i took my mdk 6.1 cd (i didn't burned a 7.0 cd yet) and i
-> repartitioned the HD to install linux in the PC. Obviously i deleted the
-> old w98 installation. i was trying to install wnt4.0 in a separate
-> partition. i had NO any problems running linux. But whatever i do, i can't
-> even format correctly the fat partition.
->
-> i know that lilo can't boot partitions beggining in cylinder
-> greater that 1024. i made booteable the partition, i also tried hda1 to be
-> the fat partition. but when i format such partition (with dos) it
-> recognizes it as if its size would be 2Gb, althought it is 5Gb. After
-> reboot, dos does not find c: unit.
It is not that the boot partition has to begin at a cylinder less than
1024. Rather, the partition has to be entirely in cylinders less than
1024. You may want to create a small partition (15 MB is plenty) mounted
as /boot such that its last cylinder is 1023 or lower. Then create other
partitions as you need them.
Mess-DOS uses FAT-16, not FAT-32, so it is limited to a partition of 2
GB. NT 4 with no SPs also has this problem for FAT partitions. As far as I
know, there is no SP for NT 4 that supports FAT-32, so you may be out of
luck there.
What I would do: First build a small (30 MB) DOS 6.22 partition. Then an
extended partition large enough to hold all the NT partitions I
wanted. Then NT partitions as needed in the extended partition. Then
another extended partition for Linux, also subdivided as needed. Just make
sure that you create the boot partition first in the Linux extended
partition, and that its last cylinder is 1023 or lower.
Then install DOS on the DOS partition. Get that running. Then install NT
on the NT partitions. DO NOT USE NTFS. You will not be able to read NTFS
partitions from Linux except with an experimental driver, which may not be
reliable (I don't know, I haven't tried it lately). Installing NT will
modify the DOS partition and change its boot sequence to allow you to boot
to DOS or to the NT partition.
Then install Linux. Set LILO to boot either to the DOS partition or the
Linux partition. You boot to NT by booting to DOS at the LILO prompt, then
selecting NT in the NT boot loader menu.
I use the DOS partition for those few utilities that you have to have,
such as peripheral card configuration utilities, that only run on DOS.
--
-- C^2
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