Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
> To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
>
> > Three of my four drives here have developed partition table
> > problems in the past week, which I hope I have fixed (the last two
> > stayed the proper size but the last partition on each doubled
> > itself - is this possibly a BIOS problem?  They were working and I
> > only noticed the problem while trying out spinrite on them.).
>
> Were these drives all in the same PC? Could be a serious motherboard
> problem. I wouldn't use a PC that trashes hard drives that badly.

The 3.2G drive that BIOS thought was 1.2G was in one computer, causing 
problems with the OTHER (linux) drive, but the other two drives (in which 
the last partition on each suddenly doubled in size) were in a computer 
that won't work with loadlin unless I use MS DOS 7.10 (or put zimage on a 
floppy disk formatted with it).  I was offered a replacement computer by a 
friend who has to get it out of storage.    Until that happens I hope to 
keep this one working, also I need for find a replacement drive for the 
other computer.


> >   A friend offered a 4G scsi drive.  I have the card and what looks
> > like a scsi cable (long, blue, stiff).  To use it with linux would
> > I need to do anything more than boot with my new scsi-capable
> > kernel?
>
> If you have the modules for your SCSI card and the disk module it will
> work, barring SCSI hardware difficulties.

The scsi card is working in that computer with scsi zip and scsi scanner 
and it has a place to plug in the cable.  The zip drive uses sd_mod.o.  I 
presume I will have both and sda1 and an sda4 (zip drive is always 4).  Do 
I need to set a scsi ID on the hard disk?  The zip can be 5 or 6.  I don't 
have it yet as the neighbor wants to take off some files. It is 2G.

> > Is there some advantage to having four smaller partitions instead
> > of one big one and maybe a swap partition?  A smaller partition
> > seems to boot faster and I could probably just use another
> > partition mounted on /tmp when I needed more space for compiling,
> > or use it to store .tgz packages that I don't need to get at, or
> > mount it to use in copying music files.
>
> If you're using a DOS or Windows filesystem, you don't want many
> partitions because of file fragmentation. Unix partitions should be
> fine with four parts.

This will be a linux only drive.   I don't know how to use scsi in DOS - 
device=aspi.sys?  But then what?

In DOS I thought smaller partitions let you have smaller cluster sizes.

> David
> --
> _______________________________________________
> Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
> http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10
>
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org