I had the following problem: after some severe disk problems (i.e. crash) I started from the beginning, and installed a virgin 10GB disk as hda. I did not have Debian CDs at hand so I installed SuSe 5.2 with the following partitions: hda1 1023 kb dos (fat16, iirc), empty hda2 2023 kb dos (fat16, iirc), empty hda3 2023 kb ext2 root partition hda5 128 kb swap hda6 2023 kb ext2 usr partition other partitions to fill up the disk cfdisk rounded the partitions to cylinder boundary Suse installed fine but was not bootable from hd (non system disk) so I gave up and got Debian 2.0 CD. I deleted all partitions and remade everything. Reinstallation with that was successful, hd was bootable and Debian ran fine.
After that I switched the 10 GB disk to hdb and tried old hd as hda. That booted into W95, which I upgraded to W98. I formatted both dos partitions on hdb (10 GB disk) (under W98, I think). The first partition works fine but the second one is giving problems. It is VERY slow, and every time scandisk is run it found 1.5 MB worth of lost files. It also complains that FAT table and backup do not agree. Reformatting the 2 GB dos partition in W98 complained about corrupted MBR. In conclusion, think that combination of cfdisk and lilo can not partition disk and create mbr in a way that is completely acceptable to W98. If there is a simple fix, like cfdisk offering to zero the beginning of new dos partition, it should be implemented. Otherwise the situation should be clearly explained in installation docs, like: 'If you think you will ever need a MS operating system in your box you must install it firs, since Debian breaks the assumptions MS does. This means your MS system will not work correctly.' t.aa "J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 12, 1998 at 02:56:09PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote: > > Madarasz Gergely gave an excellent reason for this problem to occur and > > since Ray apparently agrees with it (he hasn't complained for 2 weeks now) > > I don't have enough data to disagree :-) > > Seriously though, both Jano and I have systems that suffered from partition > overlap syndrome; I just don't know how to determine for sure if Linux or > Windows is to blame. > > I surely hope that this will be mentioned in the installation document soon. > > Ray
