On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, H C Pumphrey wrote:
>
> Greetings, fellow Debian fans,
Greetings (:
> This is only a proto-debian question, I'm afraid, but I have tried to
> RTFM, honest. I'm trying to defrag the disc on a W95 laptop prior to using
> FIPS to re-partition it so I can put Debian on it as well[1]. W95 defrag
> will move a lot of stuff (which it colours turquoise) to the beginning of
> the disc, but
One piece of advice: back up everything you want to keep! i used fips on
my Win98 FAT32 drive at one point, and even though it didn't appear to
wreck anything Windoze refused to start until i restored from a backup i
made (in my case it was easy, two HDs). Second piece of advice: don't use
the M$ backup to do it, if you need to use the CD to boot it makes you
reinstall windows before it'll read the thing no matter what.
[[[SNIP]]]
> A related question: the Linux+Win95 mini-HOWTO says that if you have FAT32
> you should not try using LILO. Is this info up-to-date? What about the
> business about the Linux boot partition having to start below sector 1024
> (assuming LILO can be used ).
i have no trouble using lilo with Linux+Win98's FAT32. My setup is for a
two-drive system, but it _should_ work for a single drive multi-partition
system. In my setup, the Linux drive is hda (on partition hda2), while
windows is on hdb (partition hdb1)
The Linux section of my lilo.conf is vanilla:
image=/vmlinuz
root=/dev/hda2
label=Linux
read-only
alias=1
For quite a while, Windows refused to boot at all from lilo. i finally
solved the problem by using some obscure commands buried deep in TFM.
Probably you won't need them, but they're here for a reference anyway.
other=/dev/hdb1
table=/dev/hdb
# The map-drive directives make windows think it's on the primary
# master drive instead of the primary slave. Windows would think
# Linux was on the slave if it could see it.
map-drive = 0x80
to = 0x81
map-drive = 0x81
to = 0x80
label=win
alias=2
> [1] Yes I know. I should nuke W95 entirely, but I want to be sure that (a)
> I never use it and (b) all the hardware works OK in Linux.
Understandable, i did the same thing. I only use windows now when
extenuating circumstances force me (i.e. i need the windows-only printer
diagnostics). Windows was quite helpful in verifying my hardware settings,
especially the soundcard and printer. Although it turned out they were
exactly as i would have suspected from the docs.
> [2] Not sure how to find this out.
To find if it's a FAT32? You should be able to right click on the drive
icon in windows and look in the properties. Or else, a good partitioning
program should tell you.
