🚀 go-pugleaf

G'Day all,

I have installed Linux on many machines but have come
across a ?problem? I have not seen before.

My mate Brendan has a Pentium 166 with 2 physical hard drives,
a C: drive (600 Mb) and a second 2.4 Gb drive partioned into
2 Gb (D:) and 400 Gb (E:).

I thought I'd put a minimal Linux system on the E: partion for him,
so I started.

Jumped into MS-DOS mode (it's a windows 95 box, upgraded from
Win 3.11), fired up FDISK and deleted the 400 Mb partition.

Under DOS FDISK partion information reports:

Partition   Status   Type   Volume Label  Mbytes  System   Usage
----------------------------------------------------------------
D:1          A      PRI-DOS  DISK2_VOL1   2047    FAT16    84%

Leaving me to believe I have nearly 400 Mb of spare disk to play with
for Linux swap and Linux.  I got hold of InfoMagic locally (had to beg
and borrow it as Linux seems not to be sold in Mildura) and in this
comilation is the Red-Hat distribution 'Red Hat Linux 2.1'.  I make
a boot disk and the two RAM disks and re-boot Linux on the machine.

The installation guide then asks a few questions and drops into the disk
partition routine.  I answer 'yes' I want to change the partition
information on the second drive.  The information presented by
cfdisk() looks like this;

Name          Flag    Part Type     FS Type    Size (Mb)
--------------------------------------------------------
/dev/hdb1   BOOT,NC   Primary       Unknown    2445.12

And no amount of coercing can get it to report any free space
to add another two partitions...

What is going on.  The CD is dated 1995, is this a 2 Gb disk problem
of some sort, I remember SCO chucking a wobbly a number of years
ago when disks lept up to 1 Gb that looked similar...

Any help or hints would be appreciated, I sold him on the
benifits of Linux over Windoze so I'm losing some credo
here ;)

The drives are IDE, the CD is a 10X IDE, it has 32 Mb of RAM
on board.

Regards,
Mark

http://www.southwest.com.au/~addinall

(although plese (r)eply to this account, I'm on hols :)