Re: disaster with LILO, Debian Linux, Windows, and booting
Alvin Oga wrote:
> old bios that does not support lba-12 will have problems,
> thus the dumb work around to put /boot under the 1024 cyliner limit
>
> another equally dumb way is to boot off floppy
>
> another silly way out is to go to your local surplus place and buy a 20GB
> disk for $20 to install linux onto it and you're now "fixed"
It's not that old of a system. It's a 1.6GH P4.
>> /dev/hda1 = 20 GB, fat32
>> /dev/hda3 = 2 GB, swap
>> /dev/hda4 = 52 GB, ext2
>
> bad idea ...
>
>> /dev/hda5 = 60 GB, fat32
>> /dev/hda6 = 20 GB, fat32
How do I make it better? Windows went on first, occupying partitions 1, 5,
and 6. I wanted to create a small boot partition for linux on hda3, but I
ran out of primary partitions. Trying to put the bulk on linux on an
extended partition didn't work. (I don't rememember if the partitioning
program complained or windows complained.) I already have a second drive on
the system, though I suppose I could get a usb drive. Can I boot from a usb
drive or would I have to use my other internal drive?
>> hda4 is nearly 2/3 full. Last time I compiled a kernel it was probably
>> only about 20% full.
>
> kernel chews up 50m - 100mb depending on what you do to it
I guess my last statement was a little ambiguous. I wasn't suggesting that
the kernel compile ate up all that disk space. Since the last time I
compiled a kernel, I added a large amount of stuff to /dev/hda4.
By copying some files around, I was able to get my images low enough so
that they boot. Finally!
But I want to solve this the right way, since I know this will come back to
bite me again sometime later. Is it the size of the linux partition causing
the trouble or the absolute location on the hard drive that causes the
problem? That is, If partition 1 was say 90GB and partition 4 (with the
linux root) was small, would the boot problem exist?
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