🚀 go-pugleaf

bobs@apgea.army.mil (J. Robert Suckling) wrote:

>A better solution is to get a secound disk drive and partition that
>some of that for Linux( Remember the partition needs to be in the first
>500 Meg).  Disks prices are falling.  Of cource that does cost money...

I found an exception to this rule - I'm running Linux on the 2nd partition
of a 1 Gig Western Digital drive.  The difference is I'm using a so-called
"smart" IDE controller card.  It has it sown bios that remaps the head and
cylinder count of the drive to something DOS understands.  

When I installed linux, I discovered that following the normal instructions
for dealing with big drives didn't work, but just entering the "bogus" disk
info as is did work.  What seems to be hapenning is the controller card
intercepts the bios probe from the linux kernel and answers with its own
remapped platter and cylinder count, and the kernel is satisfied and keeps
moving on.  It worked for me under slakware 1.2.3 kernel and 1.2.11 kernel.

FWIW, I've used FIPS to repartition DOS disks on two systems (the one with the
WD disk and smart controller and a laptop).  It works like a champ, IS 100%
reversible, and easy to use.  Just don't misplace the FAT data files FIPS
copies to floppy for you!

Steve Greene
sgreene@access.digex.net

>
>Backing up your software can save you money, should you have to
>replace some of bought software or more costly your own data.  If
>Linux does nothing else for you, You can make compresed-back-ups of
>your DOS partitions easy with Linux and some extra disk space.