i have tried the linear mode, i waited to see if anyone had any comment
about possible data loss, in the end it didn't make any difference, i
did try something that should have occured to me before and that was to
disable ide and try to boot from scsi;
an odd thing - instead of an instant reboot, i had the first l of lilo
fillowed by a continuous screenful of '01's filling my screen!
i got out of that pretty quick! it didn't look healthy but i can't seem
to find anything wrong,
i'm beginning to feel that i have some odd hardware thing that doesn't
let me boot from scsi properly even though i could swear that it did it
with win98 (when it first came out and i played with it while still
keeping win95) if this is the case then this could be a horse well and
truly flogged
as for the number of partitions, history i guess, a combination of
migrating from original win95 with fat16 and keeping cluster size down,
having data that i wanted to backup all on seperate partitions, messing
with NT and deciding that there just HAD to be a better way!, creating
space in the extended partition when i wanted to install linux, keeping
some back because you never know and plain old being irrational!
from the fdisk ....p results i posted i see what you meant about
partitions having creationdate info on, i can see the history of my
partition manouevres matches the results now,
i take your point about booting from ide but to explain an earlier
comment, the last time i installed lilo to ide i than had a problem i'm
not sure what but i lost all partition info for that drive and i had an
effectively empty hard drive, a few screams and weeks later, the worlds
smallest win95 istallation on the other drive(it was full, and now i
remember how i know scsi boots win9x) major net searching and i had a
few tools to try and recover my data, which i did, but it wasn't pretty,
and to be honest until i've got my linux the way i want it i'm loathe to
risk this scenario again ( i guess i was born an old man)
besides there has always been a part of me that thinks 'if it should
work, then i want to know why it doesn't' i think my grandfather was
part terrier.
/etc/fstab/ is here:
/dev/hda2 /mnt/drivec vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/drivee vfat user,exec,conv=auto,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/drivef vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/drived vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/driveg vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/driveh vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto
user,noexec,nodev,nosuid,rw,noauto,sync,unhide 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto user,noauto,nosuid,exec,nodev,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 auto user,noauto,nosuid,exec,nodev,ro 0 0
bascule
p.s. made D drive on scsi active, hid it, unhid it -no active partition
on scsi drive -voila!
