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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
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