Partitioning a drive with windows already on it?

[John Covici]

Modern Bioses should be able to boot past the 1024 cylinder boundary
-- if the BIOS will handle it, lilo boots to about 20gb according to
its docs. But tell us the exact warning and maybe someone can figure
it out -- I would use partition magic over the free stuff at this
point.

on Wed, 2 Jan 2002 20:54:22 +1000 Geoff Shang <gshang at uq.net.au> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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-- 
         John Covici
         covici at ccs.covici.com