Does DSL need a real partition?


Forum: HD Install
Topic: Does DSL need a real partition?
started by: mort

Posted by mort on Aug. 30 2005,20:58
Does DSL need a real partition?  My hd has XP on the Primary partition 50G, 50G Vfat for data, 2G ext swap, the other 200G is an Extended Partition with 50G Logical Drive for SUSE.  The rest of the extended partition is unformated.
Will DSL be funtional with a Logical drive slice of the remaining portion of the hd and a pointer to the sda2 for swap?

Thanks Mort.

Posted by mort on Sep. 01 2005,19:33
Could one of the hd install experts comment on my post?  I guess I could just format a logical drive, figure out the identifier, and try to load it.  Maybe dev/sda5 ore dev/sda6?  Do you think DSL can use the swap area already dev/sda3? swap=/dev/sda3 as a boot opttion.
I still get a little nervous playing with the partition table on multi boot machines.  It's such an easy way to destroy a updated, tuned and funtional OS.
thanks,
Mort.

Posted by hawki on Sep. 01 2005,20:45
Hi Mort
If you can I would boot DSL from cd first.  DSL should auto-magically find and use your swap partition.  If it does it should work the same after hd-install.  Using a logical partition for DSL is not a problem.  While you are booted up with DSL at a terminal bash prompt do the following

sudo cfdisk
or
sudo cfdisk /dev/hda

That should show you the disk partitions and allow you to add one in your free space.

You SHOULD be able to do your install at that point.

BE VERY CAREFULL

I have added DSL to several systems running 95, 98, and nt4 with no problems but have never tried WXP.
Your boot loader will probably get over-written but it usually finds the existing operating systems and adds entries for them.
good luck

Posted by mort on Sep. 02 2005,21:32
Thanks hawki,

I feel better knowing others have been down this road.  DSL really impressed me when it found my wireless connection on an embedded boot and played classical music!  A nice piece of work.  Now to see if I can get a ndis wrapper to do the same. Thanks again,
mort

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