Greetings all.
I currently use a dual booting system with Win95 and Mandrake 6, hda
Windows, hdb Linux. I have decided that I no longer wish to have my system
defiled by Windows and would like my main machine Linux only. I am
intending to remove the windows hard drive and use it for other, more
sinister purposes. Now if I can help it I don't want to do a reinstall,
instead I would just like to make hdb (where Linux is) into hda. I am
guessing that this can be done by modifying my fstab and lilo.conf files.
Are there any other files i would need to change?
So that I don't come up with an unuseable system i thought I'd run my
proposed changes by the list first - see if there are any obvious mistakes
in my plans.
Here is my current fstab file - it looks a bit strange but I have opened it
using MS Notepad as I am at work. It didn't seem to translate that well -
I've fixed it up best i can.
/dev/hdb6 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto
sync,user,noauto,nosuid,nodev,unhide 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto
user,noauto,nosuid,exec,nodev,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows msdos
user,exec,dev,suid,rw,usrquota,grpquota,conv=auto,uid=501,gid=501,umask=666
1 1
/dev/hdd /mnt/zip auto user,noexec,nodev,nosuid,rw,noauto
1 1
Now I don't know why my original partitions hdb1 and hdb2 were turned into 5
& 6, but I'm sure Linux knew what it was doing. My intention is to delete
the /dev/hda1 line and modify /dev/hdb5 to /dev/hda5 and /dev/hdb6 to
/dev/hda6. Does that sound okay?
Here is lilo.conf (again I apologise if it looks strange)
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
linear
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.9-27mdk
label=linux
root=/dev/hdb6
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=dos
table=/dev/hda
I believe that in the image section root=/dev/hdb6 can be changed to
root=/dev/hda6.
Obviously the other section can be removed and I would run /sbin/lilo {as I
write this my mind has just thought of a problem}
I am also curoius as to how lilo will know where the /boot partition is. I
am sure that when I installed mandrake I included a separate /boot partition
on hdb. It doesn't appear in fstab or lilo, so how will it find the correct
device to use? IS there another file?
I am guessing that if I boot up, make the necessary changes to the files,
shutdown, change the drives around and reboot everything should work okay -
except one thing I can't write to the MBR of the linux drive (the
aforementioned problem). If I use my startup floppy can I pass arguments to
lilo at the prompt to boot successfully to linux - or am I stuffed?
Or can I pass an argument to /sbin/lilo (no lilo man pages at work to check
I'm afraid) so that it will write to the MBR of the linux drive (at this
point still hdb) with the information so that it will boot correctly from
the linux drive as hda?
A second query out of interest:
In my current setup Windows is installed on a standard hard drive, while
Linux uses a DMA33 capable drive. The bios has DMA/33 enabled however my
understanding is that if the master device on an ide port is not DMA/33
capable then the slave cannot operate DMA/33. What I would like to know is
- after I change my system around and remove Windows, will Linux take
advantage of the DMA/33. During boot up I see that the kernel makes certain
optimisations for the various hard drives so does the kernel do some sort of
probe during boot to determine if DMA/33 is present, or is there some other
initialisation script that contains that information?
If anyone can tell me if what i am proposing to do is correct (or more
importantly incorrect) then hopefully this coming weekend will run nice and
smoothly.
Thanks in advance
Aaron
***When it comes to computer failures - prevention is better than a cure***
