[lug] 2 questions

[Dale Harris]

On Mon, Nov 29, 1999 at 09:21:22AM -0700, Tory Patnoe elucidated:
> I have been busy this holiday installing Mandrake Linux.  I am a
> relative newby and have a couple of questions.
> 
> 1)  Can you make a boot partition greater than /dev/hda4?
> A friend wanted to install linux and a "bootable" dos partition.  The
> "Disk Druid" formatter always put the dos partition on /dev/hda7.  Fine
> by me, but lilo came back with a "can't find partition in table" error
> when trying to add /dev/hdb7 as a bootable partition (Yes we did install
> dos on that partition).  I know from "fdisk" hda1-hda4 are "primary"
> partitions and anything greater is "logical".  Is this the problem?

You can make partitions higher than that, but you have to make an 
extended partition first.  I'm not very familiar with disk druid, I 
typically just use fdisk.  DOS, I believe, could have a problem finding
a partition as high as hdb7, you might want to make the DOS partition one
of the first four.  

> 
> 1a) Can you run "Disk Druid" after linux is installed?
> I tried to run Disk Druid after the laptop was up and running but
> couldn't find it.  I know technically this is three questions.

I don't see why you couldn't.  You can run fdisk.  Course modifing existing
partitions will destroy them.

> 
> Warning: This is an MS Windows problem.
> 2)  Can you make Win95 not read a particular partition?
> I installed linux on my Dad's /dev/hdb drive which had an existing dos
> partition, /dev/hdb5.  Linux was installed on /dev/hdb1 and a few
> others.  Everything works fine from the linux perspective, however, when
> he runs in Win95 mode it trys to read /dev/hdb1 and mounts it as a cdrom
> drive.  This makes the Windows Explorer very slow when viewing the root
> tree.  
> If this keeps up he will probably remove linux. Is there a way to make
> Win95 not try and mount the /dev/hdb1 partition?
> 

You could configure that with LILO a believe.  Make some other partition
a VFAT (or whatever), mark it as bootable.  Course you'd probably want to
setup linux first.  


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dale Harris  <rodmur at maybe.org>   GPG key: 372FBD57    http://www.maybe.org/
                  Maybe is an Ambivalent Yet Beguiling Enigma