AS1200 : Boot help!

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 06:08:55PM -0500, Ted Goodridge, Jr. wrote:
> You need to make sure you start at sector 3 with yoru first  
> partition, and not use sectors 1 and 2 on the disk you want to boot from.   
> These sectors will be used by the bootloader when you install it.

Two sectors is not good enough.  A bootloader used by aboot takes
something of order 80-100K.  One cylinder is easy to skip with
various tools and it will be sufficient.

> 
> On Sat, 14 May 2005 17:26:23 -0500, James Kurtenbach  
> <jwkurtenbach at sysmatrix.net> wrote:
> 
> > OK, more details.   Disk Druid complained about not enough space at the
> > beginning of the disk for the boot partition. It says to make sure it
> > has at least 3 meg free.

For a boot _partition_, i.e. a place where you keep you kernels, initrd
and whatever else you need to boot, that would be rather tight.  You do
not need a boot partition although you may want to use one.  A
journalling ext3 on that partition, instead of just ext2, gives really
only an extra overhead.  For a space for a bootloader, which does not
need to be covered by any partitions, that 3 Megs is really too much but
Disk Druid often likes very wide margings;  like 100 Megs for a boot
partition (which you may possibly need if you have tons of development
kernels).  Various whinings from Disk Druid are just that.

> > I have used the disk for vms and other os's before.   Do I need
> > to do a low level format or something?

There is no reason for this.  Depending on what actually is in the
first two disk sectors you may want to zero them out and that is it.
Some leftovers may cause confusion - in Disk Druid in particular
which seems to be very easy to confuse.

   Michal