[64studio-devel] Installing and Website - Some advice...

[D W]

---- You wrote:

What I tried:
- Install 64 studio on the 4th partition.
- Figured it would be nice and simple...by default that's where the grub
bootloader went

What happened:
- System went serious screwy. The MBR couldn't address that far into the
hard drive so nothing would boot.
- Spent a very long night getting back the windows partition (fixing the mbr
is a lot hard with sata hard drives)

What are my options?
- Should I invest in a second hard drive to put 64 studio on, and run the
bootloader from that?
- Is there any way to manage it on the current sata hd? (bootloaders and
ntfs partitions don't mix from what I hear)
- Note: Keep in mind that formatting the windows partition(s) is not an
option...I'm not the only user.
---
Hey there,

I don't know anything about the website, but heres some words on your
problem..

The first thing you should be aware of is that you are limited to 4 primary
partitions, which means if you wish to create more than a root (/) partition
you will need to turn your free 50 gigs in an extended partition and create
logical partitions within it. Linux doesnt care if its on a primary.
Traditionally admins want to create separate / /boot and /usr /var and /home
partitions. Personally, I make do with just a /boot and / ... and on some
systems just a /... the reasons to create a /boot partition is that you can
go ahead and place it before the 1024th cylinder (or 8gig) boundary for CHS
mode drives, thus freeing yourself from any concerns about bootloaders and
bios limitations and also you can reuse kernels on different distros this
can be somewhat tricky but experienced users might like this ability...

In LBA mode your window of bootability (your possible responses to an INT
13H AH=4xH call) increases to 137gig, and so your /boot (or /) must start
before there... I've never tried to change from CHS to LBA while partitions
still existed on the drive and I suspect that it is a VERY BAD IDEA... But
if your going to try it (And even if your not) I HIGHLY RECOMMEND getting
yourself an MBR / Partition Table snapshot program that boots from its own
disk.. there are many of them out there and are dang handy to have... As a
solution to all this I would resize your leading NTFS drive and slap a small
/boot directory in front of it, since its the only one that actually needs
to be addressed by an INT 13H call from a bootloader. You can then put your
/ drive in that free 50 gigs...


Hope that helps, kind of a rush response, let me know if you have any
problems and I'll be glad to help..
Cheers
NoamdX
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