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Topic: noob wants dual boot dsl/win95, planning to add 20g hd to antique comp

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filbertius Offline

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Posts: 15
Joined: Jan. 2007

Posted: Jan. 14 2007,05:30

i have a 233mhz pentII gateway tower running win95a with 130m ram and a 4gig hd which i am not ready to re-format just yet. i recently got a 20gig hd from a slightly newer computer with a blown-up motherboard. i have also been playing a little with a bootable cd of dsl.

i would like to put the bigger disk into the computer (plugs, bays, etc appear ok), and run it as linux only, leaving the old hd as win95 only, using grub or somesuch to dual boot.

advice please...

1- am i crazy? (well i am... but for doing this... you know what i mean)
2- does anyone know if win95 will barf when it sees a 20g disk?
3- should it matter which is master or slave (i assume i need one of each)?
4- how much of the install can i do while on the live-cd? (i've seen a menu item for hd install)
5- i will still need to wipe the new disk - do i need to reformat it as well, and am i better off doing that within windows, or while running dsl (see #4)?

thanks in advance...

filbertius Offline

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Posted: Jan. 14 2007,21:38

too cold and mucky for yard work... may get up on my documentation and plunge on in.

wish me luck...

skaos

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Joined: April 2004

Posted: Jan. 15 2007,11:41

1. No, many people do this.
2. I don't think so. The bios may not recognize 20 GB (maybe only 8) but this should not be any problem for grub/linux which should see the whole disk.
3. I suggest that you set the 4 GB disk as primary master and the 20 GB as primary slave.
4. I think you can install the whole of DSL with that menu item.
5. Before installing you have to set the correct partition types (I think linux is type 83 and swap 82, or may be the other way round) with DSL's cfdisk or fdisk. You may also have to repartition it with cfdisk or fdisk. You can wipe the disk from DSL with one of these commands:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb (hdb=primary slave, this wipes the entire disk - be careful, watch your typing: hda is primary master)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb1 (first partition on the primary slave, hdb2=second partition etc.)

Good luck!

filbertius Offline

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Posts: 15
Joined: Jan. 2007

Posted: Jan. 15 2007,19:14

thanks skaos.

was not yet cold or mucky enough, so it may be the coming weekend before i try. will post back here to let ya'll know how it went.

filbertius Offline

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Posts: 15
Joined: Jan. 2007

Posted: Jan. 20 2007,15:02

sufficiently cold and mucky...

progress so far...
installed the new(er) 20g hd. bios sees it, not sure win95 does (would not matter to me if it could).
did the hd partition and install, and grub install while running on livecd, as in dsl-wiki.

now... (and i hope to fix this easily as soon as that room warms up a little more)... when the computer boots, it still goes only to win95 (seems fully functional still), with no sign of grub or dsl. when i boot on livecd, dsl does show a statement that it is using my swap partition on hdb1.

i think that the problem was my too strict following of the wiki, which was i guess was written mostly for dual boot on one disk. there was no mention of making hdb bootable, so i left that out.

i am planning to go back into cfdisk shortly and try to make hdb bootable (am hoping that can be switched w/o starting over).

otherwise... everything has gone pretty smoothly so far.

one other note on the wiki. after the partition and livecd reboot, i first was denied access to the disk to continue assigning the partitions. i thought a moment, whacked myself on the side of the head, and re-entered the sudo -s command again.

21 replies since Jan. 14 2007,05:30

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