On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 10:05:52AM -0600, Richard Rauch wrote:
> 
> I was there, and 10 years sounds about right.  I can't say that the name
> rings a bell.

I was 1:167/104.2 at the time if I remember well (oldest fidonet node in
Quebec at the time, run by Robert Williamson) we wrote a suite of fidonet
mailers on AmigaOS (roof, porticus, gazebo), I also often used the nick
Lord British as I was a U5 fan (-:

> Since I'd completed a full system backup prior to encountering the
> above-mentioned strangeness with fdisk & disklabel, I finally went ahead
> and just tried assuming that the BIOS partition wasn't all that
> important.  I gave a 4GB (actually 8,000,000 sector) partition over to
> GNU/LINUX, and the rest to NetBSD.  Of course, such a round number didn't
> come out evenly to a cylinder boundary.  Hopefully, that's not going to
> cause me any grief...

I used NetBSD and GNU/Linux on two different partitions (I had /boot,
swap, /, then NetBSD one which had it's own swap, / and /usr into that
same partition using disklabels)

I know that it never matters either the BIOS sees the partitions and disk
size properly for linux using LILO, however I needed the bios to know the
starting point of the NetBSD one as I used one of LILO's other= option,
and that gets executed before any kernel is loaded, requireing the BIOS..

I only used linux and NetBSD's fdisk however, and they reported the same
cylender boundaries for all partitions, except one. Filesystems never
corrupt eachother but I never could set the disklabel in a way that my
ext2 partition could be mounted, even dough the cylender boundaries were
(according to fdisk) properly setup, perhaps because of the fact that
it was in an extended partition.. the other non-extended partitions (including
my FAT32 one could be mounted properly and reflected the same boundaries on
all OSs)
 
> Aside from some griping from the LINUX installation about one of my
> partitions going past the ``end'' of the disk, all is fairly well.  I may
> have to re-do the LINUX install (and even repartition the LINUX
> segment)---I didn't know that LINUX used a BIOS-level partition for
> swap-space.

I don't know if I understand this well, the only time I had "past end" errors
was using ddruid a while ago, where if a small /boot partition at the top
of the disk weren't created the kernel would be assumed to be located too
far for LILO (ddruid assumption)... The swap could be located anywhere
even if the BIOS couldn't reach it since it was the linux kernel mounting
it afterwards (from /etc/fstab) which has no problem with large disk sizes

> (Horrors, I just had a thought.  People were talking about ~30GB disks
> having a jumper setting to mark them as smaller disks, for the sake of
> certain systems.  It's not possible, is it, that my drive (a mere 20GB;
> (^&) has such a jumper setting enabled?  NetBSD was pretty sure that it
> knew I had a ~7GB drive.  On the othre hand, I don't remember having to do
> any special coaxing to get it to recognize the drive as a 20GB drive last
> August when I first put NetBSD on it.)

I really do not know, I used maximum 15GB ones maximum only