Partitioning a drive with windows already on it?

[Geoff Shang]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Dan Murphy wrote:

> Well I now have the disk and it boots and talks, but it's giving me a
> warning about cylender 1024, which I don't understand and now I need to
> check the bios.

This warning is to do with the fact that your boot image for linux has to
be on cylinder 1023 or lower, as the BIOS can only read the first 1024
cylinders of the drive.  Since your drive sounds like it's bigger than 1024
cylinders, you'll need to make sure your linux partition begins within this
1024 cylinder limit and that the boot image is also within this limit.  I'd
suggest making a small boot partition as your first linux partition to
ensure that your kernel image is in the right place.  You could mount this
as /boot and copy your kernel there when you're up and running, so that
lilo will be able to see it.

Back-tracking a bit, I've never set up a dule boot system on the one drive,
but I do recall  reading 3 years ago that it's vital that the windows
partition be the first one.  The way to make sure you don't lose any data
is to defrag it so that all the data gets pulled to the front of the drive.
Then, say if you have 8 gigs on your 20gig drive, you know that there's no
data past the 8gb mark.  This make sense?

Geoff.