Information in this Appendix will help you decide if Partition Installation is right for you.
If your hard drive has another operating system already installed, it may be possible to install NetMAX on a different partition, allowing you to choose at boot which operating system to load. Barring limitations of the BIOS on your computer, you should not encounter any problems installing NetMAX on a single partition. Before you embark upon this process, we strongly recommend you read the "mini-HOWTOs" described in section B. of this appendix.
To install NetMAX, you must first make sure that you have enough disk space available. The space used by NetMAX must be separate from space used by other operating systems. A hard drive can be divided into different sections called partitions. Each partition can be accessed as if it were a separate hard drive. Each partition can also have a different type, thus enabling you to install different operating systems on each partition.
If you choose to install NetMAX onto a disk that already contains another operating system, keep in mind that a mistake could result in data loss. There are three different possibilities you might find with repartitioning your hard drive:
1. There is disk space that is available and not partitioned
2. There is an unused partition available
3. There is free disk space on a partition that is already in use
In the first situation, the partitions that are already defined do not take up the entire disk, leaving disk space that is not part of any defined partition. Simply create the necessary partition out of the unused disk space.
In the second situation, you have an enormous 19GB hard drive that you bought a few months ago that you partitioned into one large part (9GB) where Windows is installed, and two 5GB partitions that you intended for games and documents. Well, it's been a few months now, and you still have 4GB left on your main partition, and you've never touched the other two because there is so much disk space on the first partition. In this case, you can utilize one of the unused partitions in install NetMAX on. Just delete the old partition, and create a new one for NetMAX.
The last situation is by far the most common, and the most difficult to deal with. The main problem is that you have more than enough space available on the partition in question, but it is already in use. Besides adding a new hard drive to your system, you have two choices:
1. Starting all over - Basically, you delete the partition, and repartition your drive with several smaller partitions. This option, as you can imagine, will result in the total loss of any information that resides on your partition. After creating a smaller partition for your original software, you can install NetMAX on one of the new partitions.
2. The magic wand approach - In this scenario, you have a program that makes a big partition smaller without losing any of the files stored in that partition. This method is usually reliable and trouble free. There are several software packages that can perform this task, Partition Magic and FIPS to name a few.
If your NetMAX partition is sharing the hard drive with other partitions that have different operating systems on them, most of the time you will be okay. However, there are certain combinations that will require extra attention. Information on creating disk partitions compatible with other operating systems is available in the selection of "mini-HOWTOs" (see section B.).
If NetMAX will share a hard drive with OS/2, you must create your disk partitions with the OS/2, partitioning software, otherwise OS/2 may not recognize the new disk partitions. During installing, do not create any new partitions, but instead set the proper partition type for the NetMAX partition using the Linux version of fdisk.
LILO is the method used to boot NetMAX. Being an operating system loader, LILO operates independently of any operating system, using only the BIOS build into the computer hardware itself.
LILO has limitations imposed by the BIOS of most Intel computers. Specifically, most BIOS's can't access three or more drives, and they can't access any data stored below the 1024th cylinder of any hard drive. Some recent BIOS's do not have these limitations, but this is not universal.
In the early days of MS DOS, BIOS's used the CHS (cylinder, head, sector) method for disk geometry. This method was devised for hard drives with a limit of 32MB in size. Today, modern hard drives are much more sophisticated, having their own CPU's and onboard cache, enabling new ways of describing disk geometry. Most newer BIOS's can use LBA (linear block addressing). This basically takes the C, H, and S values of CHS, and multiplies them together and calculates a new disk block address based on the total. That's a linear block address. Making sure that your BIOS uses this method of addressing your hard drive should easily allow the Linux kernel to be under the 1024th cylinder (unless for some reason you decided the kernel just has to be greater than 8.4GB), which will in turn allow LILO to access the kernel.
From The Linux Documentation Project (http://metalab.unc.edu/linux/ )", the following "mini-HOWTOs" were selected as especially targeted and useful reading for anyone wanting to install NetMAX on a partition. There is a lot of helpful information here - worth looking at before you get started. These articles can be found on your NetMAX for Linux CD at "Using NetMAX with Other Operating Systems."
Linux+DOS+Win95+OS2
Mike Harlan, r3mdh@raex.com
v1.3.1, 11 November 1997
How to make four operating systems co-exist on a single hard disk system: MSDOS v6.22, Windows 95, OS/2, and Linux.
Linux+FreeBSD
Niels Kristian Bech Jensen, nkbj@image.dk
v1.6.1, 18 April 1998
How to use Linux and FreeBSD on the same system.
Loadlin+Win95
Chris Fischer, protek@brigadoon.com
v1.4.6, 13 March 1999
How to easily use a combination of Windows 95's Boot Menu and Loadlin.exe to autoboot Linux using the F4 Function Key.
Win95 + WinNT + Linux multiboot using LILO
Renzo Zanelli, rzanelli@southeast.net
v1.0, 26 March 1998
How to use the to multiboot between Windows 95, Windows NT, and Linux.
Lilo
Cameron Spitzer (cls@truffula.sj.ca.us), Alessandro Rubini (rubini@linux.it).
v2.02, 16 August 1998
LILO is the most used Linux Loader for the x86 flavour of Linux This file describes some typical Lilo installations.