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I'd like to echo Robert Patricks request for info. from people who
have been successful at installing Linux on their 810MB drives.
After resolving the disk geometry problem by manually telling Linux
the drive geometry (boot: ramdisk hd=1571,16,63) I was able to proceed
with the installation and noticed some strange results from Linux's
fdisk.
The linux fdisk seemed to get confused by the partitions that I had
laid out when I installed Warp. Here's the initial configuration I
tried:
Type Partition Purpose Size
P 1 OS/2 Boot Mgr 1 MB
P 2 OS/2 Warp 269 MB
P 3 Linux (/) 100 MB
E 4 Extended partition
L 5 Linux swap 20 MB
L 6 Linux (/usr) 100 MB
L 7 Linux (/home) 280 MB
Type: (P = Primary, E - Extended, L - Logical)
Linux fdisk complained about all of the non-logical partitions, a
typicial complaint looked like:
Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 379 757 1568 409248 5 Extended
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?)
phys(783,0,1) logical(756,0,1)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings
phys(783,31,63) logical(1567,15,63)
Partition 1 does not end on a cylinder boundary
phys(783,31,63) should be (783,15,63)
There were similar complaints for partitions 2, 3, and 4. Curiously
it also seemed to get the partition numbering confused. What it
thought of as partition 1 didn't correspond well at all to what I set
up for the Boot Mgr. In fact it labelled /dev/hda3 as the partition
for OS/2 Boot Mgr.
On the other hand the info. for the logical drives looked fine. I
suspected that perhaps the OS/2 fdisk was not careful about putting
partitions on cylinder boundaries (although this would seem strange).
OS2 (and DOS) fdisk don't give nearly the control (or feedback) over
cylinder layout as does the linux fdisk.
Throwing caution to the wind I decided to go ahead with the install
anyway after tagging the Linux partitions with Linux swap and Linux
native as appropriate and verifying that OS/2 was still looking at the
partitions correctly. The rest of the install went quite well (I did
get complaints about there being more than 1023 cylinders and that
some software might not deal with this well). There didn't seem to be
any problems actually writing to the drive beyond the 1023rd cylinder.
On reboot however, I was not able to get either the OS/2 Boot Manager
or the boot disk to properly find the boot block. I had originally
NOT done a DOS format of the Linux partitions and OS/2 Boot Manager
seemed to want that done. Furthermore the linux boot diskette that was
created at the end of the install simply couldn't locate the
superblock under any of the different file system types.
Since this point I've tried several other things:
1) Partitioning using Linux fdisk -- bad idea OS/2/DOS get quite
confused.
2) Tried different parition sizes to try to get OS/2 and DOS fdisks to
create partitions on cylinder boundaries. None of these were
successful as far as Linux was concerned. Again it seems odd that the
OS/2 and DOS fdisks wouldn't automatically create paritions on
cylinder boundaries... So perhaps linux is just confused.
3) Partitioning with OS/2 fdisk and formatting the Linux partitions
with DOS format first. I no longer got a complaint from the Boot manager
when I tried to boot Linux, but it wasn't able to boot from the
parition either...
4) Tried to copy the boot image from the think-pad boot
floppy (which I got from peipa.essex.ac.uk and had been using all
along) but I couldn't find the image in the root partition (I
expected to see /zImage or something similar but didn't) so I couldn't
pursue this avenue any further. Any ideas on where this kernel is
and what it's called?
I suspect I'm seeing symptoms of several different problems, but first
off I'd like to figure out how to resolve the seeming conflict between
Warp and Linux regarding the partion table for an 810 MB Sigma Drive.
Any feedback on this problem would be greatly appreciated.
One thing I haven't tried yet is using the OS/2 2.1 Boot Manager code
I'm not certain there's any difference, but since the Linux
documentation explicitly talks about booting Linux from the Boot
Manager I know it can be done. One other thing that I haven't tried
is ditching the Boot Manager and just using LILO, but my preference is
the Boot Manager at this point.
THANKS!
-Brad.