First of all, if you're installing Debian, I'd suggest going with version 2.2 (potato,frozen) instead of 2.1 (slink,stable). Potato is about to be released and is quite stable. Potato includes the new version of Lilo, so the 1024 cylinder issue is no longer a problem.
I strongly suggest reading the Debian install intructions found at the link below. Those instructions include a good section on partitioning. http://www.debian.org/releases/frozen/i386/install Here's a few other points and suggestions that may help: 1) Linux uses it's own file system, so you will have to create Linux partitions for it. Linux partitions don't get drive letters assigned to them, and Win95 will not recognize them. 2) There is no need to remove Win95 in order to install Linux as long as you have enough room. You might be a little tight, but .75 GB should be enough room for a swap partition and a root partition big enough to hold a decent Linux installation. 3) If you don't need your D drive for anything, the most straight forward approach would be to delete that partition, and then use the newly created unpartitioned space to create Linux partitions. I would also suggest deleting the extended partition that contains drive D, and create your Linux partitions as primary partitions. Linux can run from extended/logical partitions, but primaries are generally simpler to deal with. I don't see a need for an extended partition on that small of a drive. That's a personal preference however. 4) You can use Win95's fdisk to delete drive D and the extended partition, and then create and format the Linux partitions during the Debian install process. In general, Linux requires a minimum of two partitions: The main (root) partition and a swap partition, although the swap partition, strictly speaking, is not required. Tom Ed Burke wrote: > > Hi Gang, > I have reconsidered installing linux - now that I have all > my ducks in a row. > I had NT installed on an ex-corporate machine. So there were a lot > of nifty programs > but no meat behind them. I opted to discard this and install W 95 > instead. I now have > it installed on 1.25 Gb of a 2Gb disk. I figured I would install the > linux on the remaining > disk space. It says I have .98Gb of available space on drive D, drive > C has W95. > A slight aside here but W95 left me with only 100Mb out of > 1.25Gb. Is that right? > > I'm wondering if I need to partition or can I just install right to the > available drive D? > > there is one folder on D, and it is labled games, I could care > less about these. So I > presume I can over-write what ever is there. Or maybe I should format D > so there is > nothing on it. > > Ah ha, I just remembered the second ?, your > documentation says that the OS > needs to be loaded in the first 1024 cylinders. What does this mean > if I have a split > drive how do I know which is the first 1024 cylinders? It sounds as if > I should format > the entire hard drive, assign the linux partitions, then reinstall W95 > when I'm done. > > Is any of this making sense? Thanks in advance ofr your help. Ed > Burke
