Re: A new hard drive

[Robert Meckley <rmeckley@cyberia.com>]

Martin,
My advice,  if you want to boot both Linux and DOS off the same drive, would
be:
  (1) Put DOS on primary partition 1 and format it FAT16. DOS doesn't like to
boot     from any other partition. A FAT16 partition can be read by both
OS's.
  (2) Put the Linux root partition (i.e. /) on primary partition 2. Linux
likes to boot off a primary partition, but is not picky about which one.
  (3) The remainder of the drive can be an extended partition divided into as
many logical partitions as you would like for managing your Linux files. Of
course you should have a separate swap partition, and I would use only ONE
partition for swap. Make the size about twice the amount of RAM you have in
your laptop. Beside / (root) and swap, I would have at least a /usr
partition, but you might also want separate /home, /tmp, and /usr/local
partitions.
  (4) Put LILO on the MBR(Master Boot Record) and let LILO boot your OS's.
LILO can handle booting DOS as well as it can your Linux distribution.
  (5) Partition your drive in cylinder sequence. I.e., don't skip over
cylinders expecting to go back later and partition what you skipped. Do DOS
first, then with Linux Fdisk, do /, /usr, /home, /tmp, swap etc. etc. (Swap
can be all the way to the end of the drive if you like). If you don't, you
could end up with a corrupted partition table.

This advice is based on many failed attempts to set up a hard disk to boot
multiple OSs. Believe me, if there's a way to mess up, I've done it. There
may be other ways of doing it, but the above is the only way that has worked
for me.

Good luck to you. IMHO, setting up a new hard drive, particularly if you want
to boot multiple OSs, is one of the toughest jobs you can undertake. Plan
well, and don't give up till you have the drive the way you want it.
#############
Martin DiViaio wrote:

> Well, I've gone and done it. I've ordered a new hard drive for my
> laptop. It's 6GB and it will replace my exhisting drive. I would like
> some help with setting up the partitions.
>
> I've figured this much out so far:
>
> The first 1024 blocks should be /boot
>
> The VERY last partition must be a 41 MB MSDOS partition. This is so I
> can get my suspend/save to disk working.
>
> Also, I'm going to have an 80 MB swap partition. (Or can/should I do
> this in two 40MB partitions?)
>
> That's as far as I can get. I am not sure what sort of paritioning I
> would need from this point. My current disk drive is 814MB and when I
> first installed Linux, I just created three partitions on the disk. One
> each for data, swap and suspend. This setup works well but I am told
> that larger disks should be split up for data safety.
>
> Thanks for any help you can give me on this.
>
> --
>                     /)-._    Time : Fri Mar 12 07:53:04 1999
>                    Y. ' _]
>             ,.._   |`--"=    Sin lies only in hurting other people
>            /    "-/  `.\     unnecessarily. All other "sins" are
>   /)  sk  |   |_     `\|___  invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not
>   \:::::::\___/_\__\_______\ sinful -- just stupid.)
> - Lazarus Long, a fictional character created by Robert Heinlein
>
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