Very Computer

Well give it a Windows Start up Disk.
After it partitions the 15.3G for Windows, erase the windows partition
and install linux.

Hi all,

I've looked in the forums and can't find this
answer, although I'm sure it's here somewhere...

I have a 15.3 gb drive and want to install Linux
on it.  I would like to have a 4 gb root
partition and at least 3 other partitions.  My
computer only recognizes up to 8.4gb.  When I try
to install the overlay software (EZ Drive for
Western Digital), it asks me for the diskette of
my OS.  What can I do?

Thanks!

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On Wed, 11 Oct 2000 04:10:29 GMT,

I assume that you have IDE drives connected to an integrated IDE controller.
If so, make sure that you have the latest BIOS installed.  If the BIOS does
not have support for > 8.4GB drives, it may be time to upgrade the
motherboard.

-jeff

Ignore it.
Try to install linux, it doesn't trust the BIOS anyway, so linux will
detect the HDD size on it's own (and correctly)

Eric

First, do not use any dos/windows tools on the drive.
Make a small /boot partition, and spread the rest in extended partition.
Your kernel will reside in the /boot partition. You can put lilo into the
mbr or the boot partition.

You see,  the bios is important until the kernel is booted. From then on, it
is not used for hdd access.
So your boot loader LILO as well as the kernel file (vm-linuz ? ) should be
within reasonable limits ( <1024 cylinders and way below the 8.4 gig limit -
I would suggest a 100 MB partition in the begining of the drive) .
Why not let dos utilities touch the hdd ? Because they will write in a
partition table based on the info they gleaned from the bios ( which by the
way only sees 8.4 gigs ) . This will cause addressing*ups  as in
overlapping partitions etc...

By the way, Linux ( as of RH 6.0  at least,  if not earlier ) has been
working fine with ez-drive. I once received a maxtor drive with this thing
on it, and Linux did not complain at all, and was very happy with it.  *I*
decided that the 2 gig hdd did not need an ez-drive translation software ,
and promptly removed it. THe hdd had windows on it at the time.

hth

I did just that. It worked fine. The system's BIOS didn't grok
drives bigger than 8.5 GB, while the smallest drive I could
buy at the local computer store was 10 GB. It auto-detected
the drive at 8.5 GB - important to DOS, irrelevant to Linux.

The usual gotchas apply: Windoze, if you install it, will insist
on being in the first partition on the first drive. LILO needs
to be accesible from BIOS - I cut a 2 GB partition for Windoze
(found the hard way that you must use a DOS-based version of
fdisk for this), put Linux in the rest (1 GB root, 128 MB
swap, the rest as /usr), installed LILO in the MBR, and every-
thing was well.

Laura Halliday VE7LDH       "Que les nuages soient notre
Grid: CN89mg                 pied a terre..." - Hospital/Shafte

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The man page for fdisk does recomend the use of a DOS based fdisk for
DOS 6.2 (and I pesume Windows95 and newer), however I've had good luck
with the suggestion they make for those who really want to create the
DOS partition with Linux fdisk.

From the man page:

       The  bottom  line  is  that  if you use cfdisk or fdisk to
       change the size of a DOS partition table entry,  then  you
       must  also use dd to zero the first 512 bytes of that par-
       tition before using DOS FORMAT to  format  the  partition.
       For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS parti-
       tion table entry for /dev/hda1, then (after exiting  fdisk
       or  cfdisk and rebooting Linux so that the partition table
       information is  valid)  you  would  use  the  command  "dd
       if=/dev/zero  of=/dev/hda1  bs=512  count=1"  to  zero the
       first 512 bytes of the partition.

--

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"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
 relations,for Nature cannot be fooled."  -Richard Feynman
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