installing slack on new hard disk, lilo question
 

hi,

i was reading the slackware book on installation and came across this paragraph and wondered what it means:

Please note that if you are currently using another operating system's boot loader it is advisable to install LILO either to the superblock of your root Linux partition or to a floppy. Installing to the MBR in such a case will obliterate the other operating system's boot loader and can make life very difficult.

I'm using Mandrake's boot loader right now, but I'm not sure what the "superblock of the root partition" means.

Also, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on setting up the partitions? (which ones, how big, etc)

Thanks

Re: installing slack on new hard disk, lilo question
 

That's just a warning, in case you muff it IMO. I always install LILO to the MBR.

If you have Mandrake installed, does it use LILO or GRUB? As for the partition sizes, what do you want to do with your comp? And can you provide, from within Mandrake (assuming it's installed), the output of ->
# fdisk -l (that's a lower case L)
and
$ df -h
Put those outputs within bracketcodebracket and bracketslashcodebracket when you post, if you understand.

hi,

I'm using LILO. the output of fdisk -l:

<code>
Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 * 1 638 5124703+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 639 4865 33953377+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 639 3443 22531131 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 4766 4811 369463+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7 4812 4821 80293+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8 4822 4865 353398+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part9 3444 4207 6136798+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part10 4208 4270 506016 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part11 4271 4765 3976056 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
</code>

and df -h:

<code>
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part9
5.8G 2.5G 3.0G 46% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part11
3.8G 3.1G 748M 81% /home
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
4.9G 4.3G 643M 88% /mnt/win_c
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5
22G 16G 6.2G 72% /mnt/win_d
</code>

Btw, I'm going to put Slack on a new hard disk that I should be receiving soon, not this one. I just want it to have a flexible configuration, not strictly optimized for a particular task.

thanks

Don't worry about that warning as you won't lose your MS install, just the ability to boot it. If you reinstall MS it will overwrite the MBR and you'll lose ability to boot from lilo unless you reinstall it (e.g. run lilo as root).

Re partitions:
Save some space/partitions for a crash and burn install if you have the room I've had as many as thre linux installs plus MS booting with lilo although now I just run slack :-)

I use roughly 50% more than the following but this would be okay on a box: 1 Gb /, 2 Gb /usr, /1 Gb /usr/local and 2 Gb home. Give yourself a /var on a seperate partition if you expect to write allot to logs (e.g. server) but its really not necessary on a workstation and log files are text files anyway.

Fot me /home is used also used as a place to temporarily write files when burning disks and I could get by with less otherwise but if you ( or other users) keep allot of music and graphics files you might want more.

i see, sounds good. just to clarify, what's MS?

thanks

Microsoft.

I should have said square bracket. It is the one that looks like this [ so do [ code ] before the post and then [ / code ] after the post, without the spaces. This just maintains the format and makes it easier to read. I've changed them above so that you can see.

Okay, the LILO that you have now - is it in the MBR? When you install Slack it will detect that and you can add the Slack partition you wish to boot. No problem. It will be something on /dev/hdb if you put the second hard drive as slave on the primary IDE controller. It may look something like this ->I see that you have 2 swap drives. Is there a reason for this?

And then you have 4 other Linux partitions, but only 2 of them show up in df -h, being /dev/hda9 as / and /dev/hda11 as /home. I've never used Mandrake, but it may be the method of installation. Did you partition your disk while installing Mandrake?

Just pointing these out because if they're not being used, the extra swap partition (/dev/hda7) and the two extra linux partitions (/dev/hda6 and /dev/hda8) are just wasted space.

For Slackware you may partition something like this for a 40GB hard drive:

/boot - 100MB
swap - twice the amount of physical memory that you have - 512MB for 256MB of memory
/root - 3GB
/home - 25GB
/usr - 5GB
/var - 5GB
/tmp - 2GB

Since you already have 2 of your Windows partitions mounted, I assume this is where you will share data. You know, of course, that the NTFS partition can only be read from Linux, and not written to. You may even want to put a FAT32 partition on your new drive and mount it as rw (read/write) for sharing data. And if Win C is your operating system, which I believe it is, I wouldn't automount that partition. If someone hacks your Linux box, they can destroy your Windows install, also.

thanks, Chinaman.

I don't exactly remember what I did when I was installing Mandrake, but you're right, I guess I just realized that I do have two swap partitions and maybe some extra Linux partitions. Anyway I could still use those?

Also, how would I prevent my Win C drive from being automounted?

Probably just wait until you're installing Slackware. Then you can delete the partitions you're not using, and let that become free space. Different guys will advise you differently, but I reboot after that and then write my new partitions.

Go to your /etc/fstab file and remove the line about /mnt/win_c and if you don't know which one that is, post your file here and we'll tell you.

hmm,

i've decided to get a maxtor diamondmax 9 SATA 80gb. my motherboard is MSI KT3 Ultra , which I don't thinkmy motherboard doesn't support SATA though, so i need a pci controller card. any recommendations? how do i make linux recognize it?

Why not just get a hard drive that your motherboard supports? ATA 133 is just about as fast as SATA, and if you get 2 equal drivers, you can run them RAID 0, which would be faster still. Check the price of the Maxtor Diamondmax 9 Plus with 8MB cache, ATA133, 7200RPM.