Help with formatting Western Digital Drive for Linux

Albert Cahalan albert at ccs.neu.edu
Tue Mar 12 00:57:54 EST 1996


> I'm about to reformat my 1gb drive and will reinstall Windows95 and also 
> add Linux. I realize that Linux, like DOS, needs to boot below cylinder 
> #1024 on my drive.
> 
> Is there a way of finding out what cylinder number I'm at when I go to 
> set my partition sizes so I know that I've got Linux below the 1024 limit?
> 
> 2100 cyliners, 16 Heads, 63 Sectors

Boot from a Linux floppy and make two partitions, one above
and one below - use 1022 to be safe.  The Linux fdisk lets
you specify the number of cylinders.  Put a swap partition
on either side of this, or even stradling the barrier.

Boot DOS and _delete_ the low partition.  Now, create the partition
that you just removed and install DOS + Win95.

Boot Linux and install it.  After the install, mount your DOS partition
on /dos and make the /dos/linux/boot and /dos/linux/kernel directories.
Move everything in /boot to /dos/linux/boot, then replace /boot with
a symbolic link to /dos/linux/boot.  Move the kernel image to
/dos/linux/kernel (suggestion: name it like 1-2-13.ker).  Edit
/etc/lilo.conf to reflect these changes, then run lilo.

Boot DOS and mark the Linux files as system files so that defrag
will not move them.



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