On Sunday 14 September 2003 16:53, Jacob Anawalt wrote: > Pigeon wrote: > > [snip] > > >Conclusion: DOS can't cope with the presence of non-DOS extended > >partitions. How dead and chewed. > > > >So it seems that the options are something like: > > > >- don't have a Linux partition on that drive at all > >- don't have your second DOS partition, so there can be room for the > > ext2 partition to be a primary partition > >- have two extended partitions, both DOS, and use umsdos in one of them > > > >It also seems I'd misremembered how the drive letters get allocated; > >as you found out, the bootable primary partition is C:, the extended > >DOS partition(s) come next and after them the other primary DOS > >partitions. > > [snip] > > If you don't have to use the same disk for DOS and Linux, I second the > first point. Once upon a time I had win98 on hda1(first primary > partition), a second FAT32 on hda2 (second primary) and / on hda3 (third > primary). The FAT32 partitions were made with the windows FDISK from the > 98 install CD. The ext2 / (this was a while ago) was made with Linux > fdisk. One day while installing a popular windows game (which is why I > have the OS) onto the second FAT32 partition and it crashed in the > middle of the install. Oh well I thought. Stupid MS, I'll go play > FreeCiv in Linux, but Linux wouldn't boot. Booting from a rescue disk I > found that hda3's contents were garbage. [EMAIL PROTECTED]@*!! > > Oh well. I had two disks anyway and /usr/local and /home were on the > second hard disk. I really wasn't using /usr/local with > built-from-source programs, so it became /. >
That's a good point. You may have noticed, in my initial post, I did not specify making the Linux partition bootable. Currently, I have my bootable Linux on /hda, on /hdc and /hdd I have one DOS partition each and the rest Linux data partitions. So far I've never had any trouble with DOS - presumably it can handle one partition per drive without getting confused ;) My proposed multi-OS drive would have had the Linux partition (/hdc6 or whatever) as a data partition. Though I didn't say so, I'm intending to use it for temporary storage of CD images produced by mkisofs for writing to CD. It's handy to have a fixed 'empty' space of the required size that won't get filled up with junk. So if DOS/Windows goes and writes all over it, it shouldn't destroy anything that I can't easily replace. cr -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
