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Hopefully someone can help me with the following: (Newbie alert - apologies if this question is banal, stupid or both!)
I have a P166 with a 1992 AMIBIOS. This BIOS cannot deal with HDs bigger than 2Gb in size, so when I bought a WD HD as a second drive, I had to install something called 'EZDrive' to handle the size of the new drive properly. This has resulted in the WD drive being split into three partitions labelled D (2 Gb), E (2 Gb) and F (1Gb) respectively.
I want to install Linux (I have SuSE and Mandrake - not sure which one I'm going to use. Any suggestions?!?) on the D: drive (this is 2Gb in size.) However, the boot record for this device is controlled by EZDrive and not by the BIOS. If I install Linux (and LILO as a result to control booting of either Win95/Linux), I'm worried that it will overwrite the EZDrive controller which is stored in the MBR. If this happens, I'll lose drives D, E & F completely and all the data on them!
Does anyone know whether what I've described will happen? Has anyone else installed Linux on a system which uses a similar type of HD controller? I've yet to install Linux as I'm worried that some disaster like this might happen.
All help gratefully received!
I've heard great things about Linux and am looking forward to getting 'my feet wet'!
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,602
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Although I have never had to use them it is my understanding that Linux supports both EZdrive and OnTrack.
For more information see the Large Disk Howto (especially sections 7 and 8). http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html
Thanks for your previous advice regarding installation of Linux and the problems with EZDrive.
I have now installed Mandrake v7.1 on my PC on drive D. (This is actually the first partition on my 2nd HDD.) During the installation, I was asked where I wanted to place LILO to control booting - I answered the MBR and on completion of installation and rebooting found that although Linux booted up without any problem (and incidentally, a hell of a lot more quickly than Win 98!), I could no longer boot to Windows!
This was because LILO had totally overwritten the MBR which EZDrive was controlling. I replaced the MBR with an EZDrive backup I had made and can now boot to Windows. Fairly obviously, I can now no longer boot to Linux!
Is there any way of being able to get EZDrive and LILO to coexist together, giving me the option of either Win98 or Linux when I boot up the machine? I understand that there is something called 'LinLoader' available. Would this work? If so, how would I set it up?
Just in case anyone is interested, I've managed to sort the problem!
LILO seems to be incapable of booting Linux off a hard drive which is NOT hda. I have Linux on hdb. Writing LILO info. to the 1st sector of hdb does not work (I assume this is because of the 1024 cylinder rule or similar? Incidentally, having written LILO to the MBR, I lost my Windows installation as well, and Linux still didn't boot!) - having done this I can only boot Windows, LILO does not even start.
After a lot of messing around (and verifying I could actually boot Linux at all - I used a floppy boot that I made with LILO on), I copied loadlin and vmlinuz from the root of my Linux installation to my C: drive. Once I'd configured my autoexec.bat and config.sys, everything was smooth sailing. I now have a dual bootable system!
Actually, LILO is perfectly capable of booting from disks besides the primary(ie hda), the problem is your System BIOS usually isn't. That means it never asks LILO to do anything, so it does nothing. Now other software, such as NT's bootloader, or OS/2's Boot Manager can and do work just fine telling LILO to work. System Commander does fine too. Unfortunately, I don't know of any boot managers that work with EZDrive and are free, so LoadLin may be your best option for now. It may be worth checking to see if Ezdrive can do something, I don't know enough about it to say, but it's worth looking anyway.
I think you're right about the BIOS and would explain why LILO doesn't work. (In fact, looking at documentation for LILO, it is possible to boot from hdb for example.) Thanks for pointing this out. In fact, EZDrive was only installed to manage the 2nd HDD (it is 5.1Gb and my PC's BIOS can only handle HDD partitions (and drives) of <2Gb. As I put Linux on this HDD, I didn't need EZDrive anymore!)
I also had a problem whereby if I left EZDrive controlling both HDD's and my second HDD (the one with Linux on it) visible in the BIOS, Windoze kept writing information to it and corrupting the Linux installation! I had to remove EZDrive and the second HDD from the BIOS in order to stop this happening. As you're well aware, Linux doesn't use the BIOS for info. on the HDD so this worked fine.
Maybe this info. will help anyone else with a prehistoric BIOS that can't support HDD's above 2Gb in size and trying to boot off a second HDD!
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