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Before you release....



I havent participated in discussions before, but i signed up for the list and followed what your doing and pretty interested in it.  I'll probably participate in beta testing of indy.  However there is something that bugs me with almost all linux installations. I don't know if you've heard of the BIOS 1024 bug.... where the bios can not reach over sector or header 1024 therefor, the BIOS can not boot anything that is installed that is past this sector.  This becomes not so much a problem for those who are looking to just have linux on their system as it does for those who are looking to install linux on a computer with windows already on it.  This "bug" has occured in three of the four different machines I have installed linux and I've had to do manuevering to get it to work.  However if we have a first time user - trying to install linux on the 2  gigs in the back of his hard drive (ie me two years ago) and the installation writes over the MBR with lilo, and then lilo doesnt work, and then the user can not use windows or linux without again doing tricky maneuvering, we are going to have a possible linux user pissed and walk away from linux with a bad experience. 
   
    I haven't seen any installation really confront this however...
            - Redhat 6.0 wouldn't let you make a linux partition above the sector 1024 if it knew the bug was there.... however it just prevents the error from happening not                     solving it.
            - Redhat 6.1 does the same thing.... however, it doesnt include fdisk as an alternative for partitioning which i will say about later 
    I have seen three solutions....
            - I think theres a howto article on it some where... but it takes some work at the lilo.conf which doesnt work when linux isn't booting
            - The way I do it, have the floppy boot it.... but this is sorta tricky... If you want to install redhat 6.1 you have to make sure you already have a native linux                         partition already there... since you can't make one inside 6.1 installation with the bug.  If you don't have the native partition you have to find another way , fdisk in                 6.0 did the job put they took it out in 6.1
            - If you use loadlin instead, copy some files to your windows partition and someother stuff i dont remeber, but again its not really a good choice for end users, i
                believe it was posted on www.linuxnewbies.org
 
I don't know how often this problem occurs but I have encountered a few times.  If we don't find a solution there should be at least a warning of some type... its better than having someone with a bad attitude about linux because it destroyed their MBR.  Also adding a nice partition tool that can resize to the distro might add an extra specialty that makes our distro favorable might help. Anyway i think i typed way too much....                    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            ~Jon