From: jiivee@hut.fi (Juha Virtanen) Subject: Installing LILO in the hard way and makehole Date: 14 Apr 1993 02:18:11 GMT
>>>> On 13 Apr 93 12:41:21 GMT, frampton@vicuna.ocunix.on.ca (Steve Frampton) said:
:> Another final question -- if I do this, will I lose the data on my hard
:> drive, or is this specific to the master boot record. I'd hate to have
:> to move all 150+ MB of stuff off the drive before doing the fix.
No, you shouldn't.
An horror story about my LILO installation follows. I have two IDE
drives on my system.
I just installed LILO for the first time and I screwed up almost
everything with boot sectors and MBRs I could. My first drive
(entire drive is in one primary dos partition) wasn't recognized,
so I had to do FDISK /MBR several times. Then, my dos partition
didn't boot and I had to retransfer the system onto it. At last
my dos drive were ok again and I read the README once again (I
didn't have the paperdoc available yet). I checked everything
once again and got LILO to boot up linux. But it refused to
install dos at all, so I checked my linux drive with fdisk and it
reported that my root partition's physical and logical start
points differ. I had to backup my root and mkfs to it and
restore the files. Lucky me at this point because I had just day
before downloaded HLu's bootable rootdisk (before that I had only
SLS-0.98.5 a1 and a2 disks to bootup from floppy!).
In the beginning of re-making my root partition (its size is
16MB) I had there about 3800KB free space. After restoring files
back to fresh partition I had only about 1300KB free space! So,
I remembered a utility called "makehole" and played with it quite
a lot and free space increased dramatically, to about 3700KB.
Then it was sleeping time. In the morning I woke up and found my
system crashed due to problems with root partition's minix-fs. I
had to boot from floppy and do fsck onto it a few times (three or
four times, so that it didn't complain anymore). Then I checked
free space once again and got really surprised. There were -- and
still is -- about 6300KB free space!
Now I don't know if I should be worried about that since
everything works fine so far...