> I was trying to install Red Hat Linux on my roommate's new computer. It has
> a big hard drive, 10 Gigs. fips happily cut off 2 gigs from the end for
> linux. However, fdisk seemed to get really confused when i tried to create
> partitions in the empty space. As far as I can tell, it didn't know how to
> work past the first 1024 cylinders (I think it was cylinders, sorry if
> that's wrong; hardware's not really my thing). How do I work around this?
Yeah; I had a similar problem with the computer I posted to the
list about last week - though I think an actual data/start of partition
discrepancy was involved there as well. (You used fdisk, right, not
Disk Druid? Disk Druid protects you too much and won't let you set up
the partition containing /boot past the 1024th cylinder.)
Our eventual solution was to use PartitionMagic for Windows and do
the parititioning of the free space that way. It was pretty nice, actually
- we were able to format the root partition as ext2 and the swap partition
as Linux swap right there (with the partitioning difficulties we were
having we decided to let the filesystem happily exist on one partition.)
Note that you may also encounter problems getting LILO to boot off
of a partition past the 1024th cylinder - don't install LILO; use loadlin
instead. It's actually quite easy to set up (and the Loadlin+Win95
mini-Howto is quite good at explaining it - the Win95 OSR2 FAT32
instructions apply to Win98 as well, which I'm assuming is on this new
computer). The only somewhat tricky bit is getting the kernel image onto
the Win partition, since the RedHat default kernels don't come w/ FAT32 fs
drivers... It's probably easiest to accomplish it by ftp'ing or scp'ing
the kernel image it over to your own machine quickly and then downloading
it back when the machine you're setting up is booted back into Windows.
(Note you'll have to do this for the first kernel you compile with
FAT32 support as well. :) )
Mattd