Subject: Re: Newbie installation questions...
chandler@localhost.localdomain
Date: Mon May 29 2000 - 13:49:05 MDT
The following info assumes you are trying to create only one boot
partition for each OS, and not having more than startup partitions for Mac
OS.
>On Mon, 29 May 2000, Eric Fronberg wrote:
> It sounds like there's no way for me to get out of having to reinstall
> everything. :-( I'm just going to need to get into Drive Setup and
> rearange the structure of my disk.
Make a backup of all your Mac stuff. You can't repartition a single drive
safely without doing so. Yes, use Drive Setup and make at least the
following three partitions, the rest you will leave
blank/emtpy/unpartitioned/unformatted (as you need this during the YDL
install): 1- HFS+ - big enough to hold your basic Mac OS and applications
2- HFS+ - big enough for your non-shared Mac files. [Make sure on both of
these to choose a decent block size] 3- HFS - big enough to hold the files
you want to share between Mac OS and Linux [Keep in mind that HFS is not a
"modern" filesystem and is not optimal for use under either Mac OS 8.5+ or
Linux -- do not make this too large or the block sizes will be huge and
waste lots of space]
> Am I going to be 'screwed' because I can't boot from other than the
> first partition?
You are not screwed at all. You are, of course, limited to booting from
the first 1024(?) cylinders of the drive, which isn't a problem for a
dual-boot machine. You should install the BootX extension in your Mac
system folder (an HFS+ filesystem)-- you'll need to do this along with
loading the vmlinuz and ramdisk for the install anyway. This will load as
part of the machine's startup process, interrupt the process before any
serious OS loading occurs and act as an OS traffic cop, going to either
Mac OS or Linux, as you choose. You will point it to the appropriate
/dev/hda# for your linux boot directory (YDL install will tell you which
one to use). BootX is also capable of booting you into Linux at any point
after you've already booted into Mac OS.
During the install of YDL, you will do more disk partitioning using
pdisk. Do NOT touch any of the Mac/HFS partitions, just create at least
two more partitions. You probably want at least 2gb of linux/ext2 and a
256mb swap partition.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon May 29 2000 - 13:49:24 MDT