Linux - Win98 install order

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
hey, isn't the 'installing window son d:' thing just so you can install it on the second drive? i was under the impression that you would later change it round so that physical drive would then be c:, but if d:/windows is hardlinked into the system then putting windows on the secondary drive seems a bit pointless to me.

Which physical drive you install Windows on has nothing to do with the drive letters.  The drive letters are automatically assigned based on the order of the FAT or NTFS partitions.  So if you have a small FAT partition on the first physical drive and a large FAT partition on the second drive the first FAT partition Windows would see as "C:" and the second as "D:".

If you had no FAT partition on the first physical drive Windows would see the FAT partition on the second drive as "C:".  As long as you install on the second drive with no FAT partition on the first drive you should be able to remove the first drive and Windows would still work. But if you install on "D:" the "D:" gets spread all over the registry and configuration files so you would have an EXTREMELY difficult time trying to remove the first drive at that point. Now you could remove the first drive, then use Parition Magic to shrink the partition on the second drive enough and move the parition to the back of the disk, then create a small FAT parition on the beginning of the disk so it will show up to Windows as the "C:" drive, and allow you to boot your Windows up on D: which is the drive it was installed on.  That "might" work but it's a pain in the ass and ugly.

Linux (or any other UNIX) doesn't have problems like this because it does not use drive letters or reference any pariticular partition in the layout of the file system. The only place the file system layout is associated with a physical parition name is in the /etc/fstab (or equivelant). It is relatively easy to move partitions or drives around and then just change it in the "fstab" file in *NIX.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by -=f00bar=-:
umm ... Void spoke somewhere about a FAQ ... is it going to be on the fuckmicrosoft.com portal ?
And if you would appreciate, could i help translating it into dutch ?

I think a FAQ would be a cool idea, and translating it would be even cooler. However, I'm a lazy bastard when it comes to documentation so I was hoping someone else would jump on this cool idea.  

My thoughts would be to find or write a dynamic FAQ system written in PHP or Perl, using a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. Then interested parties could contribute to the FAQ through an easy interface and adding search functionality would be a breeze.  Then webby could create a "faq.fuckmicrosoft.com" host name pointing to the server that is hosting the FAQ where a virtual host would be created to serve it.

Again, I am lazy.  I did a little searching and I didn't find any FAQ systems that I really liked that were already written so to do it the way I envision would require writing one from scratch.  Now, the translation into other languages might throw a little twist into my previous thoughts.  This would be easy in a flat FAQ based system but in a database driven system you would probably need separate tables for each language (or another column which would would contain the language identifier) and each entry would need to be translated and added to the specific language section. However, it would be well worth the added programming.

It would be a good project for those wanting to learn PHP or Perl...

[Calum]

i'd love to do it, but i know fuck all about perl and nearly as much about php! i think learning perl would kick ass though, but i don't know that i'd be able to live up to the expectations that i suspect voidmain has!

 

quote:Originally posted by void main:
Which physical drive you install Windows on has nothing to do with the drive letters.  

Yes, i realise that, although the added complication arises of it not actually getting the drive letters in the right order depending on how old they are. for ages i had an E: partition that came physically before the D: partition purely because the E: partition was newer.
 

quote:But if you install on "D:" the "D:" gets spread all over the registry and configuration files so you would have an EXTREMELY difficult time trying to remove the first drive at that point.

well that's what i thought, and what i was trying to convey when i asked about it.  

quote:Now you could remove the first drive, then use Parition Magic to shrink the partition on the second drive enough and move the parition to the back of the disk, then create a small FAT parition on the beginning of the disk so it will show up to Windows as the "C:" drive, and allow you to boot your Windows up on D: which is the drive it was installed on.  That "might" work but it's a pain in the ass and ugly.

fucking right! now i understand that that was what imthesponge was talking about up there! no way! that's an untidy way to do it, and now i understand it, i would have no truck with it.
 

quote:
Linux (or any other UNIX) doesn't have problems like this because it does not use drive letters or reference any pariticular partition in the layout of the file system. The only place the file system layout is associated with a physical parition name is in the /etc/fstab (or equivelant). It is relatively easy to move partitions or drives around and then just change it in the "fstab" file in *NIX.

and you could really just mount any partition at any point on your / filesystem that had a directory waiting for it. Sounds a lot easier than all this registry nonsense.

So then, the solution to how to install linux first and then windows, is to install linux on the second hard drive (which is the big one) first, and then format the first (the small one) hard drive as fat32 and install windows on it. then use the linux boot floppy to load linux and edit /etc/lilo.conf and run lilo, yes?

did i miss anything out?

[voidmain]

You got it.

[DC]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
You got it.

Good. Now to get RH 7.3, back stuff up and jump in the deep end  

Good thing I'll have Linux even if Win decides it doesn't like my config - better than the other way around