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davepadbury
06-22-2002, 06:53 AM
When i first built my computer i made a 32 gig partition for windows XP and left 8 gig free space to install linux later, on a 40 gig drive.

I have now tried to install linux, first i tried to install Mandkrake 7. In its disk management thing on the installer it showed i only had about 800 meg free.

I then tried putting on redhat 6.1 which also showed only about 800 meg free. When i tried even creating a partition in both redhat and mandrake they both said something about the boot sector being bigger than 1024 kb's or something.

i have now tried a varity of disk tools and everyone shows a disk thats a total of 32gig.

So whats happened to the other 8 gigs? :confused:
mdwatts
06-22-2002, 07:49 AM
Both of those older distros had a old version of Lilo that didn't support booting past the 1024 cylinder (usually around the 8gb point) and would require that you create a small (20-30mb) boot partition at the beginning of the drive (or somewhere below the 1024 cylinder) to allow Linux to boot.

Would the rest of your hardware be able to support a newer distro version that doesn't have the 1024 cylinder limitation?
davepadbury
06-22-2002, 08:02 AM
So if i get a new linux distro i will be able to use the missing 8 gigs or just be able to use lilo properly?
DMR
06-22-2002, 10:03 AM
Newer distros will not have a problem with a disk that size, either in the formatting software or lilo. I've installed both Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat 7.2 on 40G drives without issue.

Read the Large-Disk-HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html#toc2) for more background on disk-size limitations in general.
keating305
06-22-2002, 10:43 AM
You might also want to take a look at your BIOS and see if it's able to see drives larger than 32 Gb. Some older BIOS can't, or you might have to re-configure large disk support.
fancypiper
06-22-2002, 10:51 AM
When a large disk is partitioned, that much space ends up being unavailable for use, even though it is labeled as free.

You probably have the 8 gig partition as a vfat (windows 98) or ntfs partition. You need to delete that 8 gig partition and use that new free space to install linux.