Bob,
Accept the following with the cavaet that I am still experimenting with
this - and this advice is subject to change without notice! (grin!!)
One thing I have discovered - personally - to my bitter regret - is that
"hda1" referrs to the first partition on the drive. Unfortunately, this
is not always the first -physical- partition on the drive, or even the
one that various disk tools tell you is first, but is the one that is
first in the partition table. (now, I do not know if the presence of
"hda2", 3, 4, or whatever has any effect.) I -have- been in situations
where the first PHYSICAL partition on the drive was not the first one in
the partition table. (and I totally trashed an existing NT install
because of this!)
"hda1" is simply the first partition in the partition table, and can be
located -anywhere- on the physical media (below cylinder 1024).
Here's another "gotcha!" The linux kernel requires that all the boot
information reside below cylinder 1024 on a HD. (This is true for all
linux, not just STN.) If any information rquired by the kernel at boot
time crosses a 1024 cylinder boundary - yer hozed.
Here's an experiment: DON'T DO THIS ON A DRIVE WITH DATA YOU GIVE A
DAMN ABOUT - THIS WILL TOAST IT!!
1. use something like Norton's disk edit to totally zero out the first
few sectors of a clunker HD. (blows away all info)
2. Do an fdisk /mbr to clean up the boot area.
3. Create a shiney new partiton, load STN, verify that it works.
4. Using something like Partition Magic, reduce the size of the
partition to something like 2 megs. Commit changes. Retest & verify
that STN still works.
5. Create additional bootable primary partitions. Commit changes &
verify.
6. Add OS's to these partitions, and use something like System
Commander to switch between them. Commit & verify.
It would be interesting to see where, if at all, this process fails.
I plan to do something just like this when I get the chance.
Jim
Bob Selby wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Apr 2000 14:43:13 -0700, you wrote:
>
> Ummm - I tried it last night and unfortunatly it is not the whole
> story :-(
>
> The hard drive IS IDE and it IS the master on the primary controller.
>
> Copying all the files to the FIRST partition on the disk (yes, I
> checked it with FDISK) and ran "syslinux c:" and I still get the same
> problem :-(
>
> The ONLY way to get this to work is to do a FDISK /MBR and then use
> FDISK again to create a single primary DOS partition and make it
> active (ie kill all partition info and rewrite the master boot
> sector).
>
> However, since the whole idea is to have a number of bootable
> partitions on the hard disk for different ISP's and configurations
> its not really the answer for me.
>
> No - I know I dont need to re-boot often, and Yes - booting from a
> floppy is usable (if slow). But this is for a school and diskettes
> get lost/borrowed/dirty and if I am going to set it up for them I dont
> want to have to keep going in there to re-create disks.
>
> Its just a shame that it cant be installed on several partitions and
> use Boot Manager to choose which one - easiest solution for the
> teacher and for me and they cant get lost.
>
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