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Format/Partition

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gump420:
The Win9x kernel has to be located before the 1024 cylinder. That is probably exactly the reason you're drive E: won't boot. I would suggest making two smaller bootable partitions (one for 98 and one for ME) and then making a seperate partition for storing documents, MP3s, etc (anything that doesn't rely on a specific OS). Also note that you can't share an application between 98 and ME very easily, although it is possible (takes much more hands on editing of the registry than I personally enjoy), so unless you have an application or piece of hardware that only runs under ME I would suggest using Win98 only.

Or something . . .

voidmain:
And it may be possible to change your drive geometry in your BIOS so that you only have 1024 cylinders but still have access to the entire disk.  I have done this before but I don't remember what the limitations are. With the newer IDE drives you can put whatever you want in the BIOS (as long as everything adds up to the right total size).  Again, this would take some research for your equipment.  I believe the hard drive manufacturer web sites have instructions on how to do this.

Calum:
Well, what about if i had win2000 and winME, would i be able to use the bootmanager that i have heard comes with win2000 to dual boot the two? Also, what is this about using the BIOS to change where the cylinders are? I don't think my BIOS is that helpful...
I should be getting a mate to download a newer Linux distribution than the ones i have so when i do, i'll attempt to use the boot managers included with that. In the meantime, i have got all the stuff off the hard drive, and it's just itching to be formatted and started all over again.
Thanks for the help, chaps and possibly chapesses, i appreciate it.

voidmain:
When you installed your drive you probably had your BIOS set to autodetect the IDE drive on whatever IDE channel you have the drive attached to.  If you look at your BIOS on boot it probably filled in the numbers for you for "Cylinders", "Heads", "Sectors per track".  Write these numbers down.

Now you can instead of set it to Autodetect, select the user defined drive type, it should let you type in your own numbers for when your BIOS can not detect the drive type.  Basically you drop the number of Cylinders below 1024 and increase the number of heads until the math is such that the total disk size is exactly the same as it was with the autodetected settings.  Now you no longer have the 1024 cylinder issue.  And there is nothing wrong with doing this on todays IDE drives.

Like I said, do some more searching first.  I have done this in the past and I used to have a formula for exactly how to figure it.  Do a search, it's out there somewhere. Look at the chart on this link which happened to be the first hit on google for me.  I wouldn't use this page for anything other than to get an idea of what I am talking about and to get an idea for more search terms:

http://math.uwb.edu.pl/~mariusz/multiboot/ii/3.html

[ February 10, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

Calum:
Ta, it's a bit alien to me but i will go and persist till it comes off okay.
Now, just a quick query, the last i think for a week or 2 in this forum, till i get that linux disk off my mate, can Linux read from NTFS as well as FAT? Also, a bit of a loser question i know, can Win9x read NTFS? (it would be a laugh if Linux could but Windoze couldn't!) and presumably an NTFS installation of winNT can read FAT?
listen, thanks for all this info, you have been really helpful. I'll post here again in a while like i say, with the results of my many patitioning and reinstalling adventures!

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