Large hard drives and debian

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> Jose == Jose L Gomez Dans <j.l.gomez-dans [at] sheffield.ac.uk> writes:

Jose> I quite enjoy debian, and I'd like to install it in a
Jose> large hard drive. However, since slink has a 2.0 kernel, I
Jose> suppose that it wouldn't be too happy about a hard drive >
Jose> 8.something Gb.

Well, AFAIK Linux 2.0 kernels have no problems with hard drives of any
size, as long as they're SCSI. LILO (and anything which uses the BIOS
to access the drive) does have problems >1GB, but you can get around
that fairly easily. Use LOADLIN to boot from the Windows partition,
or syslinux to boot from a floppy. Or make sure all your boot
partitions are under that limit.

If you don't have a real (= SCSI) disk controller, you should still be
OK. But read /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ide.txt.

Since I've still got 2.0.36 docs on my 14GB ATAPI drive, I assume
Debian happily installed on it with a 2.0 kernel (I use 2.2 now, of
course), fdisk didn't have any problems partitioning it. I do boot
from floppy, though, using syslinux. LILO has been weird and I
haven't bothered to figure out why.

But I have seen no evidence that I have a large disk once Linux boots
... except of course that I never see those pesky out of space
warnings ;-)

Jose> Is there an easy way to do this? I know debian uses
Jose> fdisk, and I suppose that you could call fdisk with the
Jose> geometry you need, but... how on Earth do you find that
Jose> geometry out in the first place?

SCSI and ATAPI drives usually tell fdisk what it needs to know. I
don't know whether it gets the info from the BIOS (unlikely) or asks
directly through the controller (best guess).

Jose> I'd like to have a section of the hard disk with a
Jose> Windows partition, which is already in place.

_This_ is the hard part. Since the normal way to fix any Windows
problem is to reinstall Windows, and Windows likes to mess with the
hard drive at installation (and sometimes requires a disk reformat,
thus I have heard[1]), you could have problems. Also, I don't know
whether the free partition resizing utility handles Windows95/98/NT
partitions yet; you probably want to get Partition Magic or something
like that if you've absolutely got to have a Windows partition.

The alternative is to get that garbage off your machine, go to
www.vmware.com, and reinstall Windows in a virtual machine. No more
hardware reboots! This worked sorta OK for me with Windows NT 4.0
(Japanese), but didn't work right at all with Windows 95 or 98 (again,
Japanese). But I decided I didn't need Minesweeper all that much.

Footnotes:
[1] I haven't used Windows for anything except Japanese OCR and
Minesweeper, ever, so don't take my word for it. I'm just repeating
FUD I've heard from people who do administer large networks of
Windows machines.

--
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
__________________________________________________________________________
What are those two straight lines for? Free software rules.

Start your own FREE mailing list at

&copy; 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved