PE> On the CDROM I borrowed from a couple of years ago, they said that I
PE> needed to tell fdisk or lilo or both (can't remember) what my real
PE> geometry was (by going into expert mode).

db> Chances are, this won't be necessary.  I've certainly never had to do this, 
db> not with Linux 1.2.13 (InfoMagic November 1995) or newer;  I'd say it's 
db> only for older hardware.

db> What you will need to do is boot from the diskettes, login as
"root", run 
db> "fdisk" and mark the apropriate second partition on your
second drive as a 
db> Linux native file system (type 83).  Write the partition table change, 
db> reboot and go through the install as per normal.

 PE> Keith, didn't you vitually wipe out your machine by not going into
 PE> expert mode?  BFN.  Paul.

sort of, linux made a bad assumption about the hard disk geometry. it
didn't seem to matter until some sort of problem occurred with win95 (i was
using lilo as the boot manager for linux, win95 and dos), then the only
thing that i could do was to boot linux through a floppy. all the dos/win
stuff could be accessed via linux, but not via dos as the wrong
head/cylinder coordinates were stored in the mbr. eventually, reinstalling
linux with the proper geometry allowed access to the dos stuff (phew!) but
win95 itself was damaged beyond repair. i had a backup plan to get the
essential stuff off via linux to the second hard disk, but when theres 2 or
3 gigs of data at risk, thats hard work (i am trying to make up my mind
between a jaz drive or a dat autoloader unit to keep full backups in
future).

my lesson was back up the mbr before using lilo, and be very wary of lilo.
lilo itself gives more utility than boot mangler as it seems to allow dos
to boot off other drives than c:.

keith
@EOT:

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