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Re: 6.4 gb hd

On 30/10/99 gisela ishihara wrote:


hello everybody

i have just installed a 6.4 gb hd and i can not boot the debian
instalation

i have read that only i need to make a small (10 mb) partition and to
put the kernel image there?

is that true?
it depends on whether you have a broken BIOS that thinks disks are never larger then 1024 cylinders (~500MB) unless you bought your motherboard/computer VERY recently (this year maybe last) you do. this means you must have a partition that resides completely within the 1024 cylinder limit, you do not necessarily have to have a partition just for the kernel if you farm our your partitions you can have a 80 - 100MB root partition and be perfectly safe. 


how can i accomplish that?
if you like to have monolithic partitions (big bloated things that hold the entire filesystem root and all) then you must go the 5 - 10MB /boot partition, otherwise make a partition for the following (at the very least: 

/
/usr
/home
/var
swap
I like to make a /tmp partition too in order to protect / and allow it to be safely smaller with this configuration / can safely be 80 MB (probably smaller but I don't like to restrict myself too much in case of changes in linux that cause more space to be required. my current root partition is 90MB and is only 30% or 40% full iirc 

just make sure the / partition is the first one on your disk.
another thing to watch for is something called LBA or LARGE disk modes in the BIOS, they are pretty gross kludges whose only purpose seems to be to fix (partially) the 1024 cylinder limit without fixing it (even new bioses that no longer have this problem have these modes which must be used for crappy^W MS win*) I personally think you should shut off these modes and use the real geometry there is less chance of problems that way (LBA and LARGE basically translate the disk geometry (cylinders, heads, sectors) into something fake so there appears to be less cylinders) you must [re]partition your disk after that mode has been set to NORMAL. these kludges do not entirely work for very large disks they will raise the bar past 512MB but usually not to the entire disk. 


thanks a lot




Best Regards,
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
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