Baslinux mailing list

[Ron Clarke <ariadne AT acepia.net.au>]

HI Sindi

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 22:07:11 -0400 (EDT)
Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com> wrote:

> We are putting together some computers for DOS and linux (with 3 or 4 ISA
> slots) each of which will have two hard drives and two sizes of floppy
> drive (which means converting one of the power supply plugs since we ran
> out of the regular styles unless someone has a better idea).  The two 
> drives are so I can have four DOS partitions and more than one linux 
> partition (4 per drive).  In DOS, after putting on software, I can resize 
> the partitions with partition magic, or add or subtract partitions, 
> without losing any data.  I start by defragmenting the partitions so as to 
> make free space at the ends of them.
> 
> Is this true of linux?  Can I format the entire 1G drive as one ext2 
> partition, and then later, with say 300 M of linux files on the drive, can 
> I split it into two 500M partitions without messing up linux?   If I 
> remove files from linux and then put more files on, do they go into the 
> contiguous free space at the end of the partition, as in DOS while there 
> is such space, or do they fill in the holes left by removing files?
> 
> I might want to use a separate partition for BL1, BL2, BL3, and BL4 or
> FreeBSD, for instance.  I have not found any need for a swap partition
> since I have 64M RAM.  We have run out of connectors for a third hard 
> drive.
> 
> How have other basiclinux users ended up partitioning their drives and 
> what sorts of operating systems do they have on them?  Would it be better 
> to start off with 2 or more partitions and split linux up among them 
> (mount them all and if I decide I want to use more than one operating 
> system, move all the BL2 files to one partition and unmount the others?).
> 
> All ideas on this welcome.

   I have installed two new HD on separate machines, one 20 GB and one 40 GB.
Both machines run MSDOS 6.20 as their main OS.

   For both, I used fdisk, from a BL2 RAM boot, to partition into 4 separate 
primary partitions.
2 and 3 on each HD were 2 GB DOS partitions, my greatest need, and 2 and 1 
were set to Native Linux.

   The DOS partitions needed Nortons Disk Doctor to setup properly. 
After that, I simply installed the Linux distros I wanted into the partitions 
I had set aside for them.
 
Regards,
         Ron 

-- 
Ron Clarke 
AUSREG Consultancy      http://www.valylink.net.au/~ausreg/index.html
Tadpole Tunes           http://tadpole.mytunebook.de/
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