[TriLUG] Dual Boot / Laptop Advice

[William Sutton]

You should consider whether or not you need/want Windows for any reason 
other than following the install guide.  Unless you plan to be booting 
back and forth to Windows to look at the install guide, or want to try 
installing Wine to run the guide, or have some business/utilitarian reason 
to keep Windows, I say install Linux only and refer to 
google/manuals/trilug for information on how to do things.

I'm presently running a dual-boot Linux/Win98 laptop due to the 
utilitarian reason mentioned above.  It's a Sony Vaio PCG-505GX, rather 
small, etc., etc.  It has a hardware hibernate-to-disk option common to 
some (I don't know about all) Thinkpads.  If yours has this capability, 
read the following paragraph carefully.  In any case you probably ought to 
read it ;)

Windows 98 requires being on the first partition.  Similarly, the 
hibernate partition and Linux boot require early locations in the disk 
partitioning scheme.  The following should provide you with a decent guide 
(adjust according to your laptop's needs) for the layout and relative 
sizes:

Disk /dev/hda: 6007 MB, 6007357440 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 776 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       474   3583408+   c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2           520       776   1942920   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           475       484     75600   a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation
/dev/hda4           485       519    264600    5  Extended
/dev/hda5           485       519    264568+  82  Linux swap

Now, (omitting the swap partition), what this translates to is this:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             1.9G  1.5G  254M  86% /
/dev/hda1             3.5G  2.3G  1.2G  67% /win98
none                   31M     0   31M   0% /dev/shm

plus the swap (256 Mb), plus the hibernate partition, which is sized 
according to the following formula:

2 Mb for overhead
X Mb equal to the amount of video RAM in your laptop (in my case, 2 Mb)
Y Mb equal to the amount of system RAM in your laptop (in my case, 64)

So, 68 Mb (actually, due to partition sizes, a tad larger).

Here's the deal:  If you completely blow away your current disk setup 
(which you probably should do), you need to account for the hibernate 
partition when you set up the new disk layout.  You will also need to 
toggle its type (the partition layout (first listing, above) comes from 
fdisk, so you can use that to determine the type), and you will also need 
to format the partition.  For that you need to download and install a 
program called lphdisk (going from memory, I believe 
www.procyon.com/pda/lphdisk, but you should google it to be sure).  It 
comes with instructions but is pretty much as simple as running the 
program and specifying a partition to format.

All of the above is for what it is worth.  If I can be of further 
assistance, feel free to contact me.  Probably best to reply on-list so 
that future people can search for answers :)

William Sutton


On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, matt-nc wrote:

> I've got an old ThinkPad T20 here and since I know nothing about laptops 
> and IBM has an online user guide that installs and runs under Win98, I've 
> been thinking about installing a dual boot system with Win98 and Linux.
> 
> Any advice or suggestions about how to do this?
> 
> On the other hand, is there really that much I would learn from the user 
> guide?  Should I just install Linux and figure out the laptop as I go along?
> 
> Matt
> 
> 
>