[ltp] ram

[Peter Hutnick]

Daniel W. Schar said:
> hey
> so i have upgraded my 1.5gig to a 20gig drive, using a program that lets my
> 310ED take more thn an 8gig drive...works great!!!  runnin slackware on it
> right now, and a partition with win98, and a small one with openBSD...

I'm glad this is working for you, but there is a better way.  That program sits
on your boot sector, and acts as another BIOS (just like on a SCSI card or video
board), adding support for extended drive geometry.  This is all great /except/
that it 1. works just like a boot sector virus (and so your OS may not like it,
and AV software might not either) and 2. more importantly, if anything "funny"
ever happens to your disk (like you run LILO against the boot sector, or you
re-install win98) you will probably have unrecoverable data loss.

Finally, win98 may be using (slow) int13 disk access.  Check "My Computer"
properties, the "performance" tab.  If it doesn't say "Your system is configured
for optimal performance" and you have a white box that's what's going on.

I told you that, so I could tell you this.

The better way is to find out how much disk your system supports (if it was
working with 1.5 it is probably either 2gig or 8gig) and just make sure that all
of your "boot" drives are in that range.  So, for instance:

/boot   15M    partition 1 (primary)  (Linux)
C:      1000M  partition 2 (primary)
/boot   15M    partition 3 (primary)   (BSD, or whatever)
ext     18.9G  partition 4 (extended)
D:      5G     logical drive 1
/       5G     logical drive 2 (Linux)
/       5G     logical drive 3 (BSD)

Or whatever.  The point is that even Win98 will see a drive that is outside the
BIOS accessible area of the disk.

This may be a bit of a hassle, since you can't just have a big C:, but in the
long run it is worth it.

Anyway, I mostly am saying this so folks will think twice before doing what you
described in your post.

Good luck.

-Peter



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