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In order to avoid the problem of DOS not seeing the second primary 
partition (and on some computers als the third and fourth partitions) on 
the primary master drive if I set up the primary slave drive with extended 
partition and linux in logical partitions on it, I used a huge drive 
(10GB) and made one primary and one extended partition (with a bunch of 
logical partitions in it) on one huge drive and copied DOS to hda1 
(primary, active) hda5 (logical) hda6 (logical)

and linux to
hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10

I boot BL2 from hda9

I cloned this drive to another 10GB and a 30GB with some bad sectors 
(skipped 6GB of the drive).

I can now find C: D: and E:, which was my goal.

But now I cannot boot linux with lilo because it is past the first 
gigabyte (DOS used that up).  In fact on the 30GB drive I had to wall off 
six gigabytes of bad sectors and lilo complained and would not even 
install to floppy drive (1091 sectors, won't go past 1023).  On the 10GB 
drive it installs to floppy disk but the boot process stops at LI , 
probably because /boot is not in the first 1GB (it is in the third 
gigabyte).

I was trying to boot with lilo to determine why on these larger drives 
svgalib has mysteriously stopped showing more than VGA resolution.  I 
compared all the relevant files (svgalib_helper.o, libvga.so.1.9.25, 
libvga.config, zgv) with md5sum.  I get lots of resolutions if I boot with 
linux from a drive with BL2 on a primary partition (even if there are also 
logical partitions on it) that starts in the first gigabyte (I tried both 
with BL2 on slave drive, and with BL2 on primary drive together with DOS). 
David Moberg's 1-floppy disk with zgv and svgalib on it also works.

One PCI riva card is still working properly (in one computer, anyway).
Three computers won't display correctly with any cards (I did not test the 
riva PCI but I tested a bunch of others in them such as other rivas, which 
work using linux booted from smaller hard drives, ATI, Rendition, Matrox).

I will next set up a drive with DOS in hda1, an extended partition, and 
BL2 booting from hda5 (logical partition) in the first gigabyte and if 
that works, then BL2 past the first gigabyte, to see whether the problem 
is related to logical partition or location of partition.

Has anyone else run into problems using BL booted from logical partition?
I could reorganize to put BL3 and BL2 in the first gigabyte and most of 
DOS some place else.


I tried to fix a computer with dead onboard controller, using a Promise 
PCI IDE controller, but DOS won't even boot from that controller because 
the BIOS only lets you boot from drives attached to onboard IDE 
controllers, and linux would not boot after I booted to floppy and then 
tried to boot BL from a DOS partition after making hde* on it using 
2-floppy BL3.50.  BL is not set up for lots of drives and partitions.

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