hard drive setup

[Ralph W. Reid]

Glenn Ervin staggered into view and mumbled:
>
>I just ran f disk on my second harddrive, 8.1 GB.
>I have set no partitions yet.
>I did not enable large disk detection, and therefore, it can only set 2
>active partitions.
>If I enable large drive detection, I believe it will be setting it to FAT
>32.
>Will this have an adverse effect on installing Linux?
>And can someone give me their preferred partition sizes and number of
>partitions for an 8.1 GB drive?
>Thanks.

Below is a script run which shows what happened when I ran fdisk on
my main Linux work horse ( the talking box).  In another email, I
stated that I had a 120 MB swap partition on this system, but as you
can read below, the swap partition is closer to 113 MB.  The other
partition sizes were more important to me when I set this thing up,
and I even considered using a swap file instead of a swap
partition--much like ZIPSLACK does.  These partition sizes are on a
system running Slackware 8.0, so you might have to adjust them a
little to meet your own needs.  I set these partitions up using the
fdisk program which came on the Slackware installation disk--no other
operating systems were necessary to get this talking Linux box up and
running.  The warning produced by fdisk concerning the hard drive set
up can be ignored since it applies only to old versions of lilo and
other operating systems.

Script started on Mon Nov 25 04:23:03 2002
$sudo fdisk /dev/hdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 16278.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16278 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1             1      7112   3584416+  83  Linux native
/dev/hdb2          7113     16052   4505760   83  Linux native
/dev/hdb3         16053     16278    113904   82  Linux swap

Command (m for help): q

$exit

Script done on Mon Nov 25 04:23:48 2002

I hope this helps, and have a _great_ week!

-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait.
SLOPE = (y2 - y1) / (x2 - x1)