🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 17 Jan 1999, Hoe Kit Loh wrote:

> I am running an overclocked Celeron, with a single 14.4GB hard disk.
> How should I partition my drive (say, with fdisk) to get both OSes
> installed, and what steps do I follow to do this from an unformatted
> HDD (the drive has not been pre-installed). Do I install Linux or
> Win98 or what? I know very little about linux itself (file system
> etc.).

Wow. Big disk!

First step is to install Win98. The reason for this is because if you
install Linux first, WindoZe will overwrite LILO, and you'll have a tough
time getting back to Linux.

With a disk that big, I'd leave it half and half {7 gig WindoZe, 7 gig
Linux}, and partition the Linux part something like this.

/	500 Mb
/usr	1 Gb
/home	1 Gb
/swap	64 Mb

You'll have to do it with extended partitions - adding the single
partition for WindoZe to this makes 5 partitions - which you can't do on a
single disk {4 is the limit}.

If you're using RedHat 5.1 or better, then let Disk Druid do it for you -
simply specify the size partitions you want - Disk Druid automatically
makes an extended partition if another one is present on the disk.

Then you have to edit /etc/lilo.conf once you have installed, and put a
section in for the DOS/Win98 partition. The details are in the manual page
- man lilo and man lilo.conf will show them to you.

> Finally, I have heard that it is possible to have a Win98/Linux
> dual boot on the same partition - can this be achieved?

Depends what you mean by "dual boot off the same partition".

Yes, you can use a DOS based loader to kick into Linux - loadlin.exe,
which comes with most distributions.

You can even install Linux on a FAT partition using the UMDOS filesystem -
but it's an *ugly* way of doing it, and much slower to boot than using a
dedicated ext2 partition.

With the kind of space you've got, I'd partition it - it's much easier!

DaZZa