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[LUG] A sorry disc tale



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I reckoned that the time had finally come to cash in on the 6Gb of unused 
space on the M$ partition on the workstation - thinking that 3Gb could be 
assigned as a real test bed, try SuSE, Sorcerer, Slackware, Lycoris, anything 
else on the LXF DVD's I've collected and then eventually Debian at which 
point I might stick.

Easy I thought. Scandisk and defrag the M$ FAT32, load Mandrake 8.1 and 
diskdrake, shave 3Gb off the FAT and reboot.

Yeah. right.

Any guesses what was missed in that process?

I meant to ask this question on the LUG a while ago:
If M$ is on hda1 and Mandrake on hda3 (hda4 as swap), what happens if I slap a 
3Gb partition IN THE MIDDLE! Oops.

I get a kernel panic, that's what happens. Failed at 03:03

If I hadn't found an old boot floppy, would there have been any way of 
mounting what was hda3 across the network? It turned out to be denoted as 
hda6, with hda7 as swap. I finally got in using boot> linux single 
root=/dev/hda6

After editing /etc/lilo.conf to change the root permanently, then running lilo 
to action the change, I still didn't get a working system - diskdrake had 
edited /etc/fstab and I hadn't formatted the new 3Gb partition. Oops again. 
So when /etc/fstab was read, the init failed.

Another visit to the boot floppy to remove the line for /dev/hda3, start the 
system, back into diskdrake to format the new 3Gb partition, and it can be 
mounted properly!

Now, one question.

If I install Slackware, Debian, Lycoris, etc. on this 3Gb, can they use the 
EXISTING swap partition (now hda7) or do I have to do more fiddling with 
diskdrake and create another swap partition? After all, only one Linux distro 
will be running at a time.

- -- 

Neil Williams
==========
www.codehelp.co.uk
www.dclug.org.uk
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