Thanks to all of you who helped me out be explaining how to handle this.
I got the HD and installed it, so I thought I would send you a report.
Installing the HD was easy. It came with partitioning software, and I
set it up as follows:
boot1
boot2
boot3
boot4
boot5
swap
backup
data1
data2
data3
data4
data5
I first created these partitions with the drive's software as dos
partitions, then, under Mandrake, used Disk Drake to change them all to
Linux partitions, with the exception of the backup partition - I want to
be able to access this from Windows as well.
So, with the HD set up, I tried to install a few different distributions.
I left Mandrake on the old HD for the meantime, and tried to install the
following on the new HD:
Caldera OpenLinux
Corel Linux
Suse
Red Hat 6.2 beta
Unfortunately, this did not go as planned. Caldera was the only one I
could fully install. It started up, but there was no option during the
install to create a boot disk (I don't want to use Lilo, because of the
hassles each time I need to install Windows anew, and I am a bit
uncomfortable with liloconf files - I found a floppy based boot loader
called gag that seems to do the trick). I was not able to reboot into
Caldera because of this. I guess it is there, on one of the partitions;
I need to see if I can get a boot floppy from the original CD.
Then I tried Corel Linux. This was an instant failure, since it only
recognized my HD as having two partitions - one of 32 megs (boot1) and
the other having 20 gigs (it is a 20.4 gig HD).
Next try was Suse. This did not work either, because the Suse installer
would only let me install it on contiguous partitions. This seems to be
quite stupid, actually, and I can't figure out any reason for it, but
that's the way it is.
I also tried a RedHat 6.2 beta CD I have from a magazine. That didn't go
very far in the install, it would not recognize my CD-Rom drive. It gave
a list of only a few CD-Roms, and I tried them all, but none of them
worked.
All in all, I am pleased that the HD questions were so easy to solve, but
very disappointed that I had so many problems installing. The proverbial
difficulties in Linux installation are real, except for Caldera, and, of
course, Mandrake. I am trying to get a few other distributions to see
what happens, but, all in all, I am quite surprised that I was unable to
go any further.
Kirk
vice versa
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