Update on getting your machine to see the full 10 gig drive: I asked my son about this, and he says that what others have done, is to install some old small drive as hda, for booting, and put the big one in as the slave (hdb), but turn it off in the bios. Then Linux will see it (hdb) and use it all correctly. How this works with win9x, I don't know. There is a stategy with Lilo for logically swapping drives for win9x stuff, so that win9x sees that the second drive as the first, and I have used it successfully, but don't know if it will work in your situation. Apparently there are sometimes some weird formatting and partitioning utilities to make big drives work with M$ OS software, which can leave things scrambled if you try to access the thing as it was designed, so I suppose that, in the worst case, you might have to completely re-partition in a more normal way, and re-install everything to use the space. LCR On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, L. C. Robinson wrote: > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 fleytin@sci.smolensk.ru wrote: > > could share data on it. I have 10 gb hard disk, but my bios gives me > > access only to 4 gb. I saved 1 gb for planned Linux installation and > > have remaining 3 gb for my Win-98 system. I actually have 2 fat > > If you look at the output of "dmesg" after bootup, before the > ring buffer loses the older stuff (on Red Hat systems it is saved > in /var/log/dmesg, right after bootup), you will find that the > kernel knows far more about your drives than the bios does. > Linux often ignores what the (sometimes pretty stupid) bios > thinks, and gets the real info directly from the hardware, when > available (as it is in modern IDE drives). You could see if > linux can see the real facts about your drive, and possibly use > it anyway. List your partitions with sfdisk instead of fdisk: > > sfdisk -lx > partition-listing > > Hopefully it will show a bunch of unused space. You could also > run "hdparm -i /dev/hda" and see what you get. > > I assume that you had to lie to the old bios about the size of > your drive, and you couldn't tell it what kind of drive it was in > the last user specified choice. If you did modify the partition > table to use the new space (assuming you can see it), what would > be the effect on win9x? I have no experience with such a > situation, so I leave it to others to relate their experiences, > if any. I know from experience that Linux often ignores bios > limitations, but where there's a drive involved, you could lose > data, if things didn't work out, maybe only with win9x. If no > one here knows more, I'd suggest you post this on, say, the very > high volume comp.os.linux.setup newsgroup (it's really more on > topic for that group anyway). As always, be sure you supply them > whatever relavant info you have collected. You might also be > able to turn up something by searching in the usenet news > archives on google.com . > > It is also possible to get add in drive interface cards that are > much smarter, and probably fairly cheaply. The last time I > needed one for an old motherboard that had no interface for > drives, I paid about $17.00, and the card also had some other > ports on it. If your motherboard has a drive interface, you > might have to turn it off, probably through the bios. I also > purchased another really smart drive interface card for about > $50, that could function as another IDE interface (linux can see > up to 4 interfaces, if you can find slots for them, for a total > of 8 drives). For old machines, used interface cards should be > dirt cheap (but documentation might be a problem, unless you can > find the maker's web site...). > > > So i wonder if i can tell Linux to accept my extended fat > > partition as its home partition without reformating it? Any > > suggestions will be highly appreciated. > > Your former vfat line in fstab: > > > > /dev/hda3 /dos vfat defaults 1 0 > > New line (change /dos /home): > /dev/hda3 /home vfat defaults 1 0 > > But first you might want to move /home to something like > /old-home, so anything in it won't get hidden (covered up) by the > mount, and make a new home dir: > > mv /home /old-home > mkdir /home > umount /dos > mount /home > > Then you'd maybe want to copy your old personal dir tree to the > newly mounted partition. This is ok for a while, but there are > some disadvantages to vfat partitions in speed, security, > permissions, and fragmentation (see the article pointed to by my > signature for details). I'd probably just make a symlink in my > home dir to the existing /dos: > ln -s /dos /home/your_login_name/dos > or whatever you want for a shortcut. > > LCR > > -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html