[ltp] cloning 14G drives

[Jacqueline R. Cooper]

Rob,

I am another Linux newbie.

The Good news:

Over the last few days I have managed to get SuSE 6.1 (kernel 2.2.7 XFree86
3.3.3.1) working on my TP 770Z (9549-8B0) with 14.1GB hdd, 256MB memory,
13.7" TFT (1280*1024) with full dual boot under both VMWare for NT (SP4) and
native. (I used the excellent little Bootpart to generate the boot sectors
into my root C:\ and update boot.ini).

Everybody's advice on the listserver here has been invaluable and I can say
a) Bill's XFree86 patches worked out of the box,
b) VMWare and their Toolbox worked out of the box
c) OSS 3.8 that came with SuSE 6.1 has got sound going under VMWare and
native out of the box (emulating Sound Blaster)
d) the Logitech PS/2 3 button mouse works out of the box
e) even the modem works under VMWare as a mapped com port
f) PCMCIA 3.0.9 worked out of the box with my Xircom CE II ps 10Mbps
Ethernet card (of course VMWare bridged networking worked perfectly as well)
g) I have already made all the mods necessary to lilo to detect memory under
VMWare and native and also to relink all config files necessary depending on
VM or native boot
Superb!

The Bad news:

I have one spanner left in the works and that is gt 8GB hdd support in
native mode (works under VMWare and reports hda CHS as 1826/16/63 during
boot).

This has just become a show stopper for the next stage of what I wanted to
do. My plan was to use VMWare Linux (yes I have that as well) to build a
Solaris 7 x86 system to a raw partition that I have reserved (/dev/hda3 to
be exact) so that I could use it under NT, Linux and native. Problem is
VMWare cannot see the partitions because the kernel cannot see them so I can
only build to a virtual disk, that would preclude a native boot of course.
Solaris 7 x86 will not install under VMWare NT because NT cannot see all of
the data on the CD (Thanks MS). I know I can do a native install but that is
a last resort as Solaris 7 x86 is very picky about portables I am told
(though Xi Graphics claim it to be okay).

The Questions:

1. Rob this fix you posted to /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/ide-disk.c, is
this for install time only, or will it get gt 8GB hdd support working with
the appropriate lilo parameters if I rebuild the kernel? (wow only been
using Linux for less than two weeks and already talking about rebuilding the
kernel).

I am not sure I fully understand what you mean when you wrote: "I know this
won't help if you're trying to install on a disk that already has partitions
above 8G.  I had to edit my partition table by hand to work around that
problem."

2. Would I be better off just upgrading to kernel 2.2.13 (I have downloaded
it already and could have a go). Also downloaded XFree86 3.3.5. But if I am
doing this would it not better to just upgrade to SuSE 6.3 which includes
kernel 2.2.13 and XFree86 3.3.5 plus more recent PCMCIA and presumably
StarOffice 5.1 etc.?

3. Does anybody know if the SuSE system update process will work with what I
have previously described or is something going to break horribly that so
far works?

4. Does anybody know for sure if (as in done it in practice) SuSE 6.3 works
with VMWare NT and VMWare Linux?

Thanks everybody as well for the excellent community of support so far. Very
exciting.

Jackie Cooper

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