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Jomboni
10-08-2001, 12:42 AM
Ok I recently upgraded my system and I want to try Redhat 7.1 again. I'll explain how I got it set up the last time. My friend helped figure this out with me, and it worked really well, but I'm open to other suggestions.

If I remember correctly, Linux needs to be installed before the 1024th cylinder on the hard drive in order to boot from LILO. At the same time, on some systems Windows 2000 won't boot if it is installed after the first 4 gigabytes on the hard drive. This poses a problem! So, what we did was, installed Partition Magic, and made a small 20 meg Linux partition at the front of the drive, and a larger partition at the end that would hold the "meat and potatoes" of the OS, if you will. When I named all the mount points in the Redhat installation, I mounted the front partition as /boot, and the bigger one as /. Makes sense. LILO worked fine and dandy!

So, today I go to do the same thing, and as Partition Magic is puttering away doing it's thing, I get a "not enough clusters" error, at which point it reboots back into Windows, and doesn't create the new partitions like I asked it to.

So... I guess I'm asking if anybody knows why this is happening and how I can fix it. Or, is this method needlessly complicated? Not that it's hard to do or anything, but is there a better way?

DMR
10-08-2001, 04:05 AM
I'm not sure why you got the cluster error, but yes, you're probably complicating things at this point. The 1024-cylinder limitation only applied to versions of lilo prior to 21-3 (I think). RH 7.1 ships with a newer version of lilo that shouldn't have that problem.

Jomboni
10-08-2001, 04:44 PM
Really? This makes my life a whole lot easier! Thanks a bunch, I'll try it tonight!

Jomboni
10-08-2001, 06:32 PM
It worked. I'm in Gnome right now!

This was without a doubt the easiest installation of any OS I've ever done. It detected all my hardware automatically. Not even Windows 2K did that, and one of the things Microsoft does really well is detect hardware, at least in my experience.

Anyway, the second it booted up I was online.

Now I just have to figure out how to set up an ftp server...