🚀 go-pugleaf

Dual booting Linux and NT

This is what worked for me:

Disk is WAD Caviar 4.3GB EDI Hard Drive
Cyl = 8912
Hds = 15
Spt = 63

As LILO must be located entirely below cylinder 1023, and I think I needed to
install NT on the first partition, I used a calculator to work out that
cylinder 1023 was at approximately 490MB.

Used a copy of MS-delpart.exe that I had downloaded from the Internet a few
days earlier to delete all the partitions.

I created a primary FAT16 partition of 350MB and installed NT, I use this as
a system partition and will only install the OS here. All other data and
programs will be installed on logical partitions later. (As I write this,
that partition has 260MB of data on it and has 90MB free, so 350MB for an NT
systems partition on a workstation seems ample.)

NT boots OK.

I then installed Linux.

I created more partitions. I followed the recommended partition setup from the
Redhat 5.2 manual, creating a 100MB primary root partition, which keeps LILO
and all the files LILO needs to access, below cylinder 1023.

I then created three logical partitions, a 127MB Linux swap partition, a 700MB
/usr partition and a 500MB /home partition. These are all above cylinder 1023,
but that's OK. I then installed Linux, selecting to install LILO at the start
of the Linux partition and NOT (and this is very important for NT, but I'm not
sure about Win 95/98) in the Master Boot Record.

After booting Linux a couple of times using a boot disk, to make sure
everything was working OK I then booted NT, and using the Disk Administrator,
created two 1 GB NTFS partitions (NTFS has smaller, more efficient clusters
than FAT16 on large partitions) I use one of these as a applications
partition and the other as a data partition (similar to /usr and /home I
suppose) Finally I used the remaining space to create a 490MB FAT16 partition
that I use to pass files between NT to Linux

I followed advice from the Linux pocketbook when creating the swap partition
and set a value for the swap partition of 1 and then selected growable, which
gave me a 127MB swap partition. In retrospect I'm not sure if I did the right
thing there, and I wonder if I still have a 127MB swap partition? Or did the
NT Disk Administrator steal some of that growable partition? I don't know,
and I don't know how I can tell, however Linux seemed to be working OK.

After I finished the installation, with the help of some people from LinuxSA I
then edited lilo.conf which allowed LILO to dual boot for me.

The more I thought about it, the more I couldn't see the logic in having so
many Linux partitions. Eventually it got the better of me and on Christmas
Day I reinstalled Linux. This time I chose Redhats Workstation-Class
installation, and let the installation process make all the decisions. The
installation process left the NT partitions untouched, but removed all the
Linux partitions and used any free unpartitioned disk space. That took about
half an hour, after which I had a perfectly acceptable dual boot Linux/NT
system.

fdisk reports the following:

   Device Boot    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      759   358596    6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
/dev/hda2           760      829    33075   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3           977     8912  3749760    5  Extended
/dev/hda5          3579     5745  1023876    7  OS/2 HPFS
/dev/hda6          5746     7912  1023876    7  OS/2 HPFS
/dev/hda7          7913     8911   471996    6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
/dev/hda8           977     1011    16474+  83  Linux native
/dev/hda9          1012     3578  1212876   83  Linux native

This is the lilo.conf that the installation process created:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36-0.7
        label=linux
        root=/dev/hda9
        read-only
other=/dev/hda1
        label=nt
        table=/dev/hda


Be aware this worked for me using NT and not Win95/98. There may be some
differences. I believe you can also make some changes in your CMOS/BIOS that
that will get you around the cylinder 1023 limit. I didn't try that so can't
comment about it.

I've also loaded Linux onto a PC at work (Workstation installation - not dual
booted) and it installed easily. I've re-installed Linux at work a couple
of times always without a problem. I've found the Redhats Workstation-Class
installation very robust, so now I'm inclined to always select the workstation
option.

Hope this is of some help.

Steve

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