Re: Linux on a 2-Drive Machine

["L. C. Robinson" <lcr@onewest.net>]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, John J. Boyer wrote:

> I don't want to do anything to the C drive, least of all
> writing in the boot record. I just want the D drive to have a
> complete Linux system.

Here's the partition table for my so called "C:" drive:
Partitioning info (fdisk -l /dev/hdb):
Disk /dev/hdb: 12 heads, 35 sectors, 989 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 420 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb4             1       988    207462+   6  FAT16

This means that windoze is on partition 4 of my hdb (2nd) hard
drive (and in this case, the only partition on that little
drive).  So you see, the "C:" designation is just a legacy M$ way
of labeling a partition on your hard drive, an awkward one, if
you ask me.  The MBR (Master Boot Record) where a previous poster
told you to put lilo, is a small sector outside any partition on
the first drive, and is not part of any operating system,
including MS-WIN9x,2000, or linux.  The MBR is reserved for the
installation of a boot loader: lilo is a far more capable, and
versatile boot loader than the usual M$ junk (note that it is
able to make my second drive appear to be first, when booting
win9x); there are at least three other boot loaders in common use
with linux.

There are also boot sectors available on each partition, which
can be used, if you make that partition boot active, or tell your
BIOS to boot from that partition (in the case of more recent BIOS
versions).  I prefer to put lilo on the boot sector of the linux
root partition, which can be just about anywhere (currently hdc2,
in my case), if the bios will support it, or, if not, another
linux partition, and activate the boot flag for that partition.
That way, ill behaved viral M$ installation software can't make
linux unbootable.  All I have to do if MS-Windoze changes the
boot flag, is to change it back to the proper partition.  But
that is just a matter of preference.

> I understand that I can start it with loadlin after my system
> boots to dos in the normal way from the C drive.

Often newbies do prefer to use loadlin, till they get greater
confidence and understanding, but that has it's drawbacks,
including the fact that the grossly inferior M$ FAT filesystems,
with their characteristic fragmentation problems, can easily lead
to an unbootable system.  I suggest you make sure that you you
have at least 2 methods of booting, including a floppy for
emergencies, and that you also learn to use one of the rescue
disk schemes available.

-- 
L. C. Robinson
reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid

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