Re: 13 Gigs, partitions and install

On Fri, Jul 09, 1999 at 11:28:44AM -0600, Les Klassen Hamm wrote:
> A friend of mine called me up and said he was going to try out
> linux. He has a brand new Asus motherboard, new BIOS, and a 13 gig
> disk. He wants to put Win98 and linux on it.
>
> I suggested he install '98 before linux. He partitioned 8 gigs as
> FAT32 and installed win98. He thinks he left the rest unpartitioned.
> Then he started the Redhat install. Disk druid said he only had a few
> megs free, so he thought he'd go back and start over again. In DOS
> again, fdisk wouldn't let him delete his partition complaining about
> extended partitions, but when he tries to delete them it tells him
> there are no extended partitions.
>
> I haven't been at his house, so I can't say for sure whether he's
> doing something really stupid or not. Has he messed up the beginning
> of the partition table or his MBR? Should we try to delete the

fdisk /mbr (in dos) is a not widely known enuf cure for ALOT of what
can screw with a disk. i generally do this after a couple hours of
hair pulling, then its fixes things...

> partitions from the linux fdisk? (That reminds me, he says now his CD
> won't boot, though it did before he tried this.) Do we need to dd the
> first few sectors of the hard drive? If so, what was the command line
> again? (Mark?) He also isn't sure whether or not Windows was flakey

i have to sadly admit, that i tried similar a while back, and had one
HELL of a time getting windows to sit on a 4 or so gig disk and leaving
the rest for linux, ended up copping out and putting each os on its
own disk where they couldnt fight with each other :(

only thing i could advise, is making partitions for each OS using that
os. for windows, just make the win partition, then boot linux, make
an extended partition containing the rest of the drive, NOT a second primary
i think that could be what screws with windows. then go and make
whatever linux partitions you need within the extended partition.
thick as mud? ;)

> (flakier than normal) when he installed it, so there might also be
> questions about the hardware itself. I can't get to his house till
> next week. Any initial suggestions or simple solutions?
>
> Thanks,
> Les...
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-- 
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Mark Duguid           Saskatoon, Saskatchewan        highbit@home.com
Timesharing: An access method whereby one computer abuses many people
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