linux on old system

[Holmes, Steve]

I have an old 486 with a 2 gig hard drive in it and Lilo won't boot the
thing at all.  What I ended up doing is install an old 40 meg hard disk and
set my boot stuff there and mount the 2 gig as an entire single linux
partition.  Once running, linux will see the entire drive as one partition
if you want.  It got a bit complicated the way I'm doing it but it is
working good right now.  I first discovered this when I upgraded the disk
drive in this thing from a 420 meg to this 2 gig and then the machine
wouldn't boot anymore.  I could always boot from a floppy and then mount the
2 gig as a new partition or I could have the boot disk actually call up the
other drive so I just kind of moved the floppy based boot system to this
little 40 meg drive as I mentioned above.  Amazing but it works.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gregory Nowak [mailto:romualt at megsinet.net]
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2001 2:55 AM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: linux on old system


Hi all,

I'm preparing to reinstall Linux on my pentium 3.
I also tried to compile a c++ program
on an old 486 I've got, and got the same errors.
Whatever I screwed up, I was sure consistent about it.
Guess I'll have to compile code step by step
of the install and upgrade to kernel 2.4.6 so that I can figure out what
goes wrong where on the way.
Anyway, my question is this.
The bios of the 486 doesn't support 32-bit lba.
Consequently, the bios only sees 504 mb of the drive.
However, in this machine's past, someone had replaced
it's original drive with a 814 mb one.
Since lilo had trouble booting the entire drive,
I made the boot partition on the first 504 mb,
used 128 mb for swap, and mounted the rest under /usr/src
since source code takes up the most space (or so I thought).
Appearently, my / partion is currently 100% full,
and /usr/src/ is 93% full.
When I do the reinstall, what is the best place to mount
the second partion at?
Or, what is the best way to setup the drive so that Ican still
boot it and get the most out of its capcity?
Thanks for any help in advance.
Greg



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