Linux Adventures: Installation

Installing Linux on a new Win95 Machine

Partitioning the Disk

The disk on my computer came partitioned into two drives C: and D:. C was almost 2G and D about 400Meg. At first I was puzzled by this, but then I discovered that FAT16 partitions (i.e. file systems under Win95 and DOS) have a size limit that's about 2Gig, so that's why the drive was partitioned this way. There are some pages in the Microsoft Knowledge Base that explain this in more detail. For example, take a look at description of FAT32 and FAT16 file systems.

Also, before starting anything I created an emergency recovery disk as described in Emergency Recovery Utility. I did not backup my system, because it was brand new and I had all the software on CDs, so at worse I would have to reinstall everything. The ERU at least saves your configuration.

FIPS

I did not want to reformat my entire drive and reinstall Windows. Instead I used FIPS to split an existing partition to make room for Linux.

It took me about two weeks to muster enough courage to repartition my hard drive. I've read the FIPS documenation that came with Red Hat at least three times before trying it. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Before starting FIPS you must defragment your drive. On Windows 95 use the defragmenter that's reachable from the Window's desktop (go to My Computer, choose the disk and select properties, choose tools and then defragment). Important: at this point shutdown Windows and run FIPS. If you run any Windows programs Windows may place files at the end of the partition you want to split.
FIPS does not work on extended partitions and my drive was split into one DOS and one extended partition (extended partition can be further subdivided, I think). Also, at most four partitions can exist a drive (actually more, because extended partitions can contain other partitions), so keep that in mind when deciding how to split the drive.

I planned to take a chunk of C: and a chunk out of D: for Linux. For installation of Red Hat you need at least two partitions, /root and swap. I don't know if Red Hat can be installed without the swap partition, the installation script wants it.

However, after I created a 600M partition for my root file system I discovered that FIPS would not split the extended partition. So I wound up taking up swap out of the remaining C partition. I wanted to have a swap partition of about 32Meg, but FIPS only allocates partitions in larger chunks, so my swap partition turned out to be 55Meg. At this point my disk looked liked this:

C: DOS Paritition	1.4Gig
Linux Swap	55Meg
Linux FS	600Meg
D: DOS Extended Parition	350Meg

You must also use FIPS to mark the partitions as Linux and Linux Swap, otherwise the installation script will not know where to put things.

By the way, you can repartition your drive without loosing any data by using Partition Magic. However, at the time I was installing Linux version 3.0 of Partition Magic came out and it cost 79 dollars for a single machine license (that means I would only be able to use PM on only one of my computers). I didn't want to spend this much money on program that I would use very little. So I stuck with FIPS.

Installing Red Hat and Booting

To install Red Hat you simply boot from the provided floppy and put the CD in the CD-ROM drive. During the installation you have to say which partitions will be used for which file systems and where the swap partitition will be.

I installed all of the system on one partition. When I add another disk to my computer, I will add other file systems. This just makes things simpler to start with.

The installation was easy. I encountered no problems at all. When I got to the last step, I didn't want to mess anymore with the boot block of my hard drive, so I skipped the "install LILO" step.

But now I had a problem, how to boot Linux? Red Hat comes with the LOADLIN.EXE utility, to boot Linux from DOS, but there was no documentation and the obvious thing I tried did not work. I'm not sure why, because later LOADLIN worked fine.

Since the Red Hat install script gives you the option to install LILO on a floppy disk, I restarted from the installation boot disk to try and do that. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to skip to the last step in the Red Hat installation, so I just re-installed everything and at the end I created a boot floppy.

At this point I was able to boot Linux!

Booting with LOADLIN

To boot with LOADLIN from DOS I created a BOOTLIN.BAT file with the following line in it:

loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3

This presumes that the directory that contains this file also contains LOADLIN.EXE and VMLINUZ, and the Linux root file system is on the /dev/hda3 partition.

Since LOADLIN will not run from Windows, I have set up an icon to run my batch file and in the properties part I set it to execute in MS-DOS mode. So when I double click on the icon in Windows, my machine is rebooted to DOS, then the batch file executes and boots Linux.

By the way, if you want to see all the options for LOADLIN, just run it without any parameters.