At some point around Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 10:53:53AM +1000, Peter Fletcher wibbled
madly:
> Hi,
>
> Although I use Linux for my work
> and quite a lot at home, I would like
> to have the best of both worlds.
>
> I have a nice shiny new 20G disk drive
> and want to repartition it so that I can
> install RH Linux 6.1 and Windows '98 on
> it.
>
> I have been going back and forth from
> the two fdisks and making a complete dogs
> breakfast of my disk.
Ok, first thought - just use the linux cfdisk - it'll cheerfully
make Windoze partitions as well as linux ones, and it's nicer to
use than the dos one too, ime
>
> Can anyone offer any hints, general
> principles or straight-out instructions
> to help me get through this?
>
> Thanks very much!
>
> Here are some details which may give you
> some idea of how I have botched the job so
> completely...
>
> - Bill's format command on my tiny 2G primary partition
> is formatting all 19G of my disk, so it is evidently
> ignoring the partition table, I guess because the old
> Windows '98 FAT tables are still present. How can I
> stop it doing this?
Use linux cfdisk, then "mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/<device>"
> - Can I get Bill's fdisk to work around my Linux
> partitions without stomping on them?
Not that I've ever seen... again, ime, dos fdisk always mangles
my ext2fs drives
> - Can I make a floppy which boots to a single user shell
> without a Linux installation already on the disk? I
> hate having to go through RedHat's installation screens
> to run little things like fdisk.
>
> - How do you format a hard disk in Linux? (other than
> having RedHat do it for you)
man mkfs.ext2
>
> - I have managed to do this before on another disk,
> but only by re-installing Linux 3 times as it was
> stomped on by Windows at various points
>
> - It would be nice to have only one huge C: drive
> at the end of the whole process, but Lilo (at least
> with RH6.1) doesn't seem to be able to cope with
> Linux starting so high up, so having a C: and a D:
> drive may be inevitable
older versions of LILO can't cope with massive (ie 20gig plus)
drives, i find. but the old must be with xxx of the start of the
HD isn't applicable with a sanely new BIOS/LILO combo, and a
2.2.7 (or thereabouts) kernel.
> - It would be nice to have both the C: and the D:
> drive initialized before Win98 is installed, to
> avoid the CDROM moving from D: to E: and confusing
> Windows immensely later
>
> - During Windows '98 installation, if checkdisk detects
> a non-dos partition, it suggests that you leave it alone
> to prevent you from stomping on some other OS. However,
> it still regards this as an error, and quits from the
> installation process
>
> Thanks for any help you can offer. If I should RTFM,
> please, which one?
>
> Peter Fletcher
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> --
> SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
> More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
--
Thomas May
Sys Admin, AMX Communications
(T) +44 (0)20 7440 3955
(F) +44 (0)20 7613 5333
(E) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(W) http://www.amxstudios.com
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