Joe,
See all of my earlier discussions on "shim" programs. A lot in the last
month, for some reason. Use shim programs ONLY if you MUST. Being that you
say your motherboard is only two years old I would expect it to support LBA
drives; are you ABSOLUTELY sure that you have to use the bios overlay (
"shim" or disc manager program) to see the full capacity of the drive? If
not, or to test it, reinstall the shim to the hard drive to undo the mbr
corruption you have now, then "uninstall" it. Check that CMOS is set to hard
drive "auto" for both configuration and mode. Fdisk should now function
normally and see the entire drive capacity. If so you can go ahead with a
normal installation.
The following discussion is assuming that you must use a disk manager program:
Your problem arises because the Linux install put the Lilo (or grub)
bootloader in the mbr area. This is where the disk manager (shim, bios
overlay) lives, thus the shim program is messed up and this in turn is
causing all of the disc problems. The fix is that you must reinstall the
shim onto the hard drive. Since you say that the floppy with the shim
software shows that everything is still there, Windon't and Linux may both be
intact, but with unknown damage from trying to fdisk &/or format while
experimenting. The discrepancy where fdisk is showing only 8GB is because it
can't access the shim information, it cannot see the whole drive; this is not
a significant problem.
Primary partitions must be created by the shim program, not by fdisk,
either DOS or Linux, and not by Partition Magic. The Linux install may be
able to then assign and divide up an empty available partition to itself, or
you may have to hand-create all Linux partitions before you begin the Linux
install.
Read the information about the shim that is with the program (a leaflette
or a readme file); it will probably say to press <spacebar> when the EZ BIOS
message is displayed to boot from a floppy. In this way you can access the
floppy drive and boot Linux from the boot disc you make when you install
Linux Mandrake. Forget conventional dual-booting.
Begin your Linux Mandrake install by using the boot from floppy procedure
that the shim requires (not doing so may cause the Linux install not to see
the Windon't partition, overwriting it: Linux doesn't see the shim's
partition information and sees the drive as empty, handling the whole drive
itself.). Do not do an automatic install. Write Lilo (or grub) on the
beginning of the partition containing Linux, NOT TO THE MBR. There is an
option near the end of the install for this that you will see when you
reinstall. This should allow you to complete your Linux install and have it
co-exist with a Windon't installation on this drive.
Though I've worked with shim programs as a computer technician, I have
not used them with Linux, thus I'm not sure about your having to make all
partitions from the shim software before beginning the Linux install. -Gary-
In a message dated 10/16/2000 6:37:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
<< A few months ago I bought a Maxtor Diamondmax 40 gig hard drive. I
installed it with Windows 98 using the included Maxblast Plus software
floppy. The software included a BIOS overlay called EZ BIOS. Everything
installed correctly and gave me two 20 gig partitions labeled D: and E:
Whenever I booted up I saw the words EZ BIOS on the screen after the Compaq
startup logo disappeared. (I have a Compaq Presario 4834 about 2 years old).
When I set up a dual boot with Linux, I put Linux on the Maxtor 40 gig
drive. I never did check to see how many gigs I was actually getting but the
install seemed to indicate I had 40 gigs available. Since then I've had to
remove Linux temporarily. I repartitioned and reformatted the drive using
DOD fdisk, but fdisk tells me I only have 8 gigs available on that drive. I
no longer see the EZ BIOS at boot. When I try to reformat with the Maxblast
floppy it seems to partition the drive into two 20 gig non-dos partitions.
Fdisk shows those two non-dos partitions but still says I have only 8 gigs
available. If I try to reformat the two partitions into DOS partitions, it
will only let me have the 8 gigs.
Any ideas?
Thank you to the experts out there.
Joe
>>
