[Wylug-help] Which Version of Linux?

[david powell]

On Monday 24 October 2005 8:40 pm, Philip Wyett wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 20:35 +0100, david powell wrote:
> > > Do _not_ partition any drive with an existing OS on it until you're
> > > really confident about your understanding of low-level drive
> > > formatting.
> >
> > this is explained in the instalation manual that comes with suse and is
> > easy to follow
> >
> > > Stick to your original plan of using a separate Linux hard drive.
> >
> > yes better idea and if you use a boot floppy to boot linux then you dont
> > have to touch the windows boot sector
> >
> > > All the mainstream distro installers will allow you to choose which
> > > drive to install Linux onto and will offer to install a bootloader for
> > > you in a sensible default configuration.
> > >
> > > The only vaguely 'tricky' decisions you have to make are:
> > >
> > >   1. Which bootloader to install.
> > >
> > >      Go for Grub.  It's more complex/powerful than LILO, but you don't
> > >      need to know anything about the complexity. The installer will
> > >      handle that for you with simple defaults.
> >
> > ok grub if its on hard disk but if you want to create a boot floppy for
> > linux and not touch the mbr or boot sector then lilo will fit on a floppy
>
> Hi,
>
> Most modern Linux distributions no longer support a boot floppy as the
> images are way over 1.44Mb.
>
> The floppy is dead and hopefully it stays that way. :-)
>
> Regards
>
> Phil
thats why you need lilo on a floppy to boot from one , the kernel image is 
still on the linux partition it just loads the boot loader for the hard drive 
from floppy grub is too big ,
 understand  theres a way to do it from a usb memory stick also but not tried 
that way yet ,
and some machines let you boot it form compact flash also , these ways don't 
touch the already installed windows , and removing the boot loader medium 
will cause it to load windows by default 

and like you say the floppy is dead but if you got a floppy drive fitted its 
as good a use as any for it you wont be using it for anything else

aside form occasional restarts dew to updates and hardware changes and the 
occasional power fail the machine here the machine here has been running 24/7 
since jan this year 
uptime avereage is 20 days between restarts so a boot floppy would not get 
alot of use here 
if you realy want no chance of disrupting a already installed windows 
partition then second drive and boot floppy or other removable boot medium 
is the best choice 
it will save you running into a problem by not creating one in the first place 

i don't dual boot this machine anymore its a linux only box now 

Dave