Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Denton He wrote:

> Thanks guys for all your help, I managed to clean my computer of everything 
> and am going to start over again.
> 
> The problem I had last time was that I only had one DOS partition on my 
> computer and I accidently used:
> 
> fdisk /dev/hda
> 
> which I think deleted all the files needed for installation from C:\baslin.
> 
> So now I want to know if I was to do fdisk with DOS again, how should I do 
> the partitions if I want:
> 
> - 5MB DOS partition
> - 25MB Linux Partition
> - 10MB Linux Swap (+4MB Physical RAM)

I think Steven explained that if you only want to run linux on your 
computer, 1MB should be enough for DOS.   And if you use 8MB for swap 
partition, this plus the 4MB RAM adds to 12MB, which we found adequate for 
compiling.  Is there some advantage to using more than 8MB swap partition, 
Steven?  This leaves 31MB for linux, which will let you compile larger 
programs and also add a few programs to the basic system.  Since you won't 
be using X, you might want to add a console viewer (seejpeg is smallest).  
What have other people added to BL3?  A few of us added ftp but there are 
ways around it (ftpput and wget work in most cases).  

I think it took 15MB for the compiler, and about 10MB (?) for BL1.  BL3 
should be similar in size if you delete X.  This would leave you about 6MB 
for adding programs in, and compiling (source code tends to be larger than 
the resulting executable file).  

> 
> So if I was in fdisk with DOS should I make:
> 
> 1 Primary Partition and what else?
> 
> and then in BL, what should I do with fdisk again?
> 
> fdisk /dev/hdb? or something else


If you have one hard drive, the partitions on it are called
hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4.
hda1 would be DOS.  hda2 linux and hda3 swap (or perhaps vice versa)

hda - first drive (master) on primary controller
hdb - second drive (slave) on primary controller

You probably do not have a secondary controller in your 386, but if you 
did anything IDE plugged into it would be hdc and hdd, including CD-ROM 
drives.

I have also accidentally turned my DOS partition into an empty linux 
partition by forgetting what was what.  DR-DOS tends to label things oddly 
so my D: drive is hda3 and my linux drive is hda2.  The c: drive (hda1) 
was properly labelled.  I deleted all my DOS files on D: by doing fdisk to 
hda3 (D:) thinking that D: was hda2 instead.  

In your case, with only one DOS partition, it is probably irrelevant which 
DOS you use.  MS-DOS can cause problems with Xvesa if you use himem.sys.
 
Steven will, I am sure, do a good job of explaining how to use fdisk in 
linux and how to make a swap partition.

> Thanks a lot guys
> 
> 
> Denton
> 
> PS.
> 
> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> "You are certainly pushing linux to the limits.  Why do you want to use
> this particular computer for programming?"
> 
> Well I'm trying to learn a bit of C programming at the moment and I have a 
> spare 386 computer with 4MB RAM, I can't really do anything else with it so 
> I thought I'll give Linux a go and hopefully in the process learn a bit 
> more 
> about it.
> 
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