On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Matt Herbert wrote:
> I excitedly agreed to help him install Red Hat 6.1. To my surprise and
> disappointment, I couldn't get it installed to save my life. He has a new
> system with a 27 GIG IDE hard drive. When he set the system up, he
> formatted a ~24 GIG Windows partion, and left 3 GIG as unpartioned space.
> For some strange reason, the redhat installer simply wouldn't allow me to
> create a / partion on that space, it kept saying there wasn't enough room.
LILO is a real-mode program that depends on software interrupt 13 (INT13)
for all disk I/O. INT13 has a design limitation that prevents it from
accessing disk cylinders numbered higher then 1023. You cannot boot Linux
from a partition at the end of your friend's disk because it would be past
that limitation. (FWIW, the same limitation effects MS-DOS, which Win98 uses
as a boot loader.)
You've got a couple options. As some have suggested, one would be to
repartition the drive to make room for a /boot partition below the 1024 sector
limit [1]. However, that is risky and a pain in the butt.
The second option would be to copy the Linux kernel to the Windows
filesystem, and use LOADLIN.EXE to boot it from MS-DOS. You can even set it
up with an MS-DOS CONFIG.SYS Boot Menu. This is simple and non-invasive. If
you choose this route, I recommend creating a C:\LINUX directory, and then
setting up symlinks such that /boot points to /mnt/win/linux or whatever.
Getting Red Hat's installer to go along with this may be tricky. Your best
bet may be to see if you can install Linux on a partition at the end of your
friend's disk, but install the boot loader (LILO) on a floppy diskette. Boot
the system using the floppy, then mount the Windows FAT32 filesystem to
install LOADLIN.EXE as described above.
I believe LOADLIN.EXE is somewhere on the Red Hat Linux 6.1 CD, in \DOSUTILS
or some such.
Hope this helps!
[1] Yes, it is a 1024 sector limit. INT13 can only access cylinders from 0
to 1023, for a total of 1024. Yes, that is confusing. :)
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." |
| -- Logan Pearsall Smith |
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