I am embarking on an experiment; to see how easy (or difficult) it is to
live in a Micro$oft-free world.
I have a brand new system on which I have installed OS/2 Warp 4, FP 12,
and Corel Linux. Now before all you power users look down your noses at
me, I chose Corel because it was advertized as being easy to install,
having a familiar GUI, having good, plain language docs, and good tech
support. So far I have not been disappointed, except with the tech
support. I chose OS/2 because I have used it for years, but OS/2's star
is setting :( while Linux's is rising. I have until now used Windoze as
a primary system and OS/2 for fun.
I have installed OS/2 and Linux on my new box several times in several
different ways and everything appears to be working normally, except
OS/2's fdisk says that my partition table may be corrupt, and will not
make any changes to the disk partitions. In OS/2 I also see a directory
with a name consisting of a string of characters looking like an upside
down pentagon. I installed OS/2 first using the first half of the drive,
leaving the rest as unallocated space (Corel would not install into
existing partitions). I created five logical drives within the primary
partition, and formatted all of them as HPFS for use by OS/2 as boot &
system partition (C:), swap partition (D:), Apps, (E:), Data (F:), and
Maintenance (G:). I did not install Boot Manager as Corel's version of
Lilo does the same thing and does not use a primary partition. [Lilo has
a death grip on the boot sector anyway; when I had Boot Manager on the
system, Lilo would appear first and I could then select Boot Manager,
OS/2, or Linux.] When I ran the Corel install routine from floppy, it
would not install until I used Corel's fdisk to delete the maintenance
partition, then the install went smoothly and Corel is now consuming the
rest of the disk.
Q1: Should I be concerned about the OS/2 fdisk problem? I have Partition
Magic 5.0 and it says all the partitions are fine, but PM5 is a DOS
program. PM5 also reports that I have 2 Active Primary partitions (OS/2
and Linux boot), and I didn't think that was possible. On a previous
install attempt, I installed OS/2 and Linux on different primary
partitions and installed Boot Manager. PM5 then reported Boot Manager
and Linux both as Active partitions, and OS/2's fdisk also reported the
same error when I used it to examine the disk.
Q1a - Is there a linux native and easy to use program which examines,
repairs, resizes partitions similar to PM5 that I should be using?
Q2: What is the best way to share data files between OS/2 and Linux? I
am considering using PM5 to resize one of my existing partitions and
create a FAT16 partition for shared data. Currently, OS/2 does not 'see'
Linux at all. Linux sees the OS/2 partitions, but when I tried to play a
midi file located on the C drive, Corel hung the system on shutdown. I
would use this data partition for my Netscape email, so I would only
have to retreive it once, and for other data files, such as documents,
images, etc, that I may want to access from either OS.
For background info, I have a EPoX motherboard (EP-58MVP3C-M) with an
Apollo MVP3 AGP chipset. I use a Seagate Medalist 17240 IDE HDD (primary
master), configured through the BIOS as a 16.4 gig drive. I'm using a
Memorex DVD on the secondary IDE controller.
Thanks in advance,
John Morrow
