On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 12:07:38PM +0000, Dom Savage wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> Could do with some recommendations. Trying to resurrect an old machine
> here and put it to some practical use as a print/email server. I've just
> put in a new un-partitioned/formatted 20 gig drive, and thought for once,
> I'd try and put the partitions in the right order! The problem is, the
> machine's bios is from 96 so wont go over 8gig, and ideally I want to put
> on a small partition (bout 4 gig) for Winbloze 95, just for compatability
> sakes (and other people in the house who aren't up to speed with linux) as
> some of the hardware in machine lacks drivers under linux.
> So, what's the general concensus these days? I probably still want to put
> a /boot in under 1024, and will use lilo for dual booting when it's
> necessary. So, format and partition under W95 first, or start an
> install for MDK 7.2 and use Partition Magic? Should I really update the
> bios...?
Well, for one thing, W95 only (did I say "only"?) supports 2 GB
partitions, as it uses FAT 16, not FAT32. Unless there is a driver and
format utility for it I don't know about.
You may not need to upgrade the BIOS. Try this process and see what
happens.
If you are planning to use it as a print and mail server, then 1) 20 GB is
overkill by an order of magnitude, and 2) why W95 other than just to dink
around with? If you are using it as a W95 box, it can't very will function
as a mail server.
That said, I'd build a primary partition of 2 GB with Mess-DOS' fdisk,
format that and install W95. Then I'd use a recent Linux distribution like
the latest tomsrtbt to build three extended partitions, one of them fairly
samll, the other two of roughly 1/2 of the rest of the drive each.
Then I'm make at least 2, maybe three 30 MB partitions for booting. Why 3?
That way I can have three active Linux installations: my current one, the
one to which I am migrating, and the old one from which I recently
migrated. I'd build a nice big /home partition and maybe another for mail
spooling.
I'd make an over-sized swap partition, knowing full well that I can set
the swap area within that partition with mkswap. I'd try to get the swap
partition more or less in the middle of the hard drive to minimize head
travel at swap time.
Then I'd install a recent Linux disty on that.
I'd leave the rest of the hard drive alone untill I needed to make new
root partitions for future Linux disties or other purposes.
Then, before I did ANYTHING else, I'd go out and buy myself a good backup
tape drive, like the HP DDS4 drive, and start building myself a bare metal
restore zip disk and set of scripts. Or I'd get BRU and use the OBDR
feature of the HP drive. I'd test that stuff thoroughly before I had
anthing more invested in that hard drive than the installations.
--
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