Thanks to Fedora community; Installation & Disk Partitioning ISSUE

[Linux Tyro]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:

 > "The boot loader is installed on a partition that doesn't lie entirely
> > below 128 GB. The system might not boot is BIOS support only lba24
> (result
> > is error 18 during install grub MBR)."
> >  __________________________________
> >
> > What does it ('the installation process') want to say?
>
> Ok, you need to learn a bit or two about booting a PC. Dual-booting is a
> nontrivial thing to setup, so you need to be aware of what is actually
> going
> on inside.
>
> You want to read about that on
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting#Boot_sequence_on_standard_PC_.28IBM-
> PC_compatible.29
>

I am going to read this all as soon as I get the time.


> When you turn on a computer, the very first thing that happens is that the
> motherboard oscillator clock stats ticking. This invokes a piece of
> hardware
> that sends a reset signal to the processor. The processor than resets
> itself
> and starts executing commands from a fixed predetermined position in
> memory.
> This is where the bios resides.
>
> The bios gets loaded, does a bunch of initialization and self-testing
> stuff,
> and eventually looks up the MBR (master boot record) of your hard disk, to
> load an operating system.
>
> The MBR is located at the very beginning of the hard drive, and is 512
> bytes
> long. It contains the partition table of the disk, and a "stage 1"
> bootloader
> --- a small piece of code which knows "where to look" for an operating
> system
> to load. Now comes the catch --- this piece of code is very
> size-constrained,
> so it relies on bios routines to access the remainder of the hard disk. The
> bios, however, may be old, and not have built-in support to access the
> whole
> space of the 250 GB hard drive. Or maybe it can. It depends on your
> particular
> bios, and the SuSE installation cannot check whether bios is capable of
> this
> or not.
>

Oh I see.


> In the end, you get the warning that the "stage 2" bootloader, which is to
> be
> positioned at the beginning of the /dev/sda6 partition, might be out of
> reach
> of bios. If it is, your system would fail to boot the SuSE installation.
> Windows would be bootable no problem, because its "stage2" bootloader is at
> the beginning of the /dev/sda1, which is on the "near end" of the hard
> drive,
> and thus certainly within the reach of bios.
>

What earlier I used to think is that, "BIOS only send the instructions to
the boot-loader (probably or whatever it sends the signal to) to just boot,
BIOS has not such a bigger memory to have the hard-disk, so hard-disk is
always beyond the hands of BIOS, but rather BIOS just sends the signal that
***IT*** should be booted and ***THAT*** gets booted.

Of course, once the OS gets booted,


from which location?


> it can see the whole disk with no
> problems, because the OS kernel (both the Windows and Linux one) is much
> more
> powerful than the bios, and does not rely on the bios to access the disk.
>

Okay.

You have two options:
>
> (1) To look up the docs/specifications of your bios version on the
> Internet,
> and read wheter or not it supports large hard drives (and how large).
>
(2) To experiment --- proceed with the installation of SuSE and hope that
> bios
> can access the disk that far. My bet is that it can, since Ubuntu had no
> problems booting from the same place on the disk. ;-)
>

You are absolutely correct and I got booted with SUSE, installed it with
all that default options and it got booted!


>  > Now the partition table (which came BY DEFAULT, at the step at which the
> > above error (in red) came) was as follows:
> >  __________________________________
> >
> > /dev/sda     232.89 GB
> > /dev/sda1   116.88 GB           HPFS/NTFS        NTFS      /windows/c
> > /dev/sda1   116.01 GB           Extended
> > /dev/sad5   4.75     GB           Linux swap        Swap     Swap
> > /dev/sda6   20.00   GB    F     Linux native      Ext4       /
> > /dev/sda7   91.25   GB    F     Linux native      Ext4       /home
> >  __________________________________
> >
> > First line: Well, /dev/sda is the whole of hard disk and its capacity is
> > 232.89 GB. Its well understood. But when I bought, the vendor told me the
> > capacity of 250 GB, so remaining (250-232.89) GB=17.11 GB are where, I
> > don't know.
>
> Q: How many meters are there in a kilometer?
> A: 1024 --- ask any programmer! :-)
>
> You want to read about that on
>
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Unit_multiples
>
> When a disk manufacturer says 1GB, they typically mean 1 000 000 000 bytes,
> which is 1000^3. When an OS says 1 GB (or more precisely 1GiB), it means
> 1 073 741 824 bytes, which is 1024^3. Hence the difference.
>
> Also, some of the space on the disk is used up for filesystem data (and its
> backups), some of it may be reserved for root (for administration
> purposes),
> etc.
>

Ah well.


>  > Second line: /dev/sda1 is the Windows partition, and I guess it is
> taking
> > number '1' since it is the default boot option...? It has been formated
> by
> > NTFS file system as shown clearly.
>
> It takes a number 1 because it takes the first position on the disk,
> physically
> speaking (it's on the "near end" of the disk). Boot order has nothing to do
> with this.
>

Okay.


>  > Third line: /dev/sda1 extended? Is it windows only? If yes, why its
> size is
> > 116.01 GB? and not 116.88 GB (which is in the line just above it). What
> > does it mean?
>
> I believe that wolud be /dev/sda2, rather than /dev/sda1.
>

Yeah, you are correct, it was /dev/sda2 (confirmed in the installation).


> You want to read about that on
>
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning#PC_partition_types
>
> In short, there can be at most *four* primary partitions on a disk. If
> there
> is need for more, one of these four is declared as "extended", and is
> chopped
> up into a larger number of "logical" partitions. In your case, there is one
> primary partition (/dev/sda1), and another primary partition (/dev/sda2)
> which
> is declared extended, and contains several other logical partitions inside
> it.
>
> Its total size is 116.01 GB, which is the space divided between swap, / and
> /home. The other primary partition, /dev/sda1, is used by Windows (the C:
> drive), and it is 116.88 GB in size.
>
> The 116 for sda2 has nothing to do with the 116 for sda1, it's a
> coincindence
> that they are almost equal in size, dividing your 250 GB disk in two almost
> equal pieces. It could have been different, depending on the size of the
> Windows partition.
>

Right, okay, I got the idea.


>  > Fourth line: /dev/sda5 Okay Linux swap, understood and it is separate
> > partition. I don't know where /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, /dev/sda4 have gone??
> >
> > >From '1' it has jumped to -->> '5'...!
>
> The dev/sda2 is the extended partition, and /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 would
> be
> 3rd and 4th primary partitions, if you had them. But you don't --- you have
> only two primary partitions, sda1 and sda2, the latter being declared
> extended. It contains several logical partitions, which are numbered sda5
> and
> onwards.
>

Okay.


> Trust me, it would be an even bigger mess if logical and primary partitions
> were mixed up in numbering. Don't worry about it.
>
> Incidentally, in principle you could customize your partition setup, and
> instead set up four primary partitions, like this:
>
> /dev/sda1 for Windows
> /dev/sda2 for Linux /
> /dev/sda3 for Linux /home
> /dev/sda4 for Linux swap
>
> That way all partitions would be primary, and there would be no extended
> partition. However, if you later choose to divide one of those partitions
> into
> two or more, you're out of luck --- you would have to back up the whole
> partition, delete it and create an extended one in its place.
>

Oh I see.

 > Fifth line: /dev/sda6 is the root, since at the last symbol '/' is coming
> > and again its a separate partition. But why it is calling Linux native?
> And
> > why there is coming a 'F' written just after 20.00 GB, what is it
> > representing?
>
> You want to read more about that on
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem#File_systems_and_operating_systems
>
> It is called Linux native because the filesystem which is to be put on it
> is
> ext4, rather than fat32 or ntfs, which Windows could use. The "F" symbol is
> the mark that this partition is going to be formatted during the install,
> deleting all previous data that may be on it (the Ubuntu OS, in your case).
>

Well, got.


> > -Boot from MBR is disabled (enable)
> > -Boot from "/" partition is disabled (enable)
> >  __________________________________
> >
> > I don't know WHY to enable any one of the above options or to enable both
> > or to not touch............? And what does they mean (the above options).
>
>
> The installer is asking you where you want to put the stage1 bootloader.
> There
> can be several stage1 bootloaders on the disk, and they can be configured
> in a
> "chain" --- the first one is always in MBR, and it redirects the booting
> to the
> one that is on /dev/sda1, or the one on /dev/sda6, or elsewhere. That's how
> you get to choose which OS to boot when you turn on the computer.
>
> The SuSE can set up the MBR bootloader and/or the /dev/sda6 bootloader for
> you, or skip it if some other OS is already using the MBR (that would be
> Ubuntu, in your case).
>

SUSE would automatically delete the MBR (which right now points to Ubuntu)
and would set the other defaults.....in it?


> Since you are going to delete Ubuntu, its bootloader in MBR will fail to
> work.
> You want to let SuSE set up the MBR, and leave the / partition alone. SuSE
> will take care of itself, and it will take care of Windows via chainloading
> its bootloader on /dev/sda1. You *don't* want to leave Ubuntu's bootloader
> in
> the MBR.
>

This is a small typical, what I got means I should not change this because
Ubuntu is in MBR and we are going to delete the Ubuntu, so enabling it
would/could make it some problem...?


> If you instead wanted to install SuSE alongside Windows *and* Ubuntu, you
> would have more than one way to answer this question (and it could get
> quite
> complicated). When setting up multiboot environments, you *always* want to
> be
> aware of what you are doing when configuring the bootloader(s), and *need*
> to
> learn and understand how it all works together. One wrong choice can render
> the whole machine nonbootable.


The system by mistake also if becomes Non-bootable, as in the case just in
above para, would it permanently become non-bootable or we could re-write
the hard-disk from scratch....(just in doubt...for future
experimentation....) However, in my case it is just dual booted, working.


> The dual-boot is the simplest of these configurations, but still you need
> to have a good idea what you are doing. :-)
>

Yeah.


> Btw, unwillingness to learn these things is one of the reasons why some
> people
> opt to using virtual machines instead of multiboot environments (of course,
> this is not the only reason, there are other pro's and con's...).
>

I didn't go in virtual environment only because I thought it would be much
better option to do...

Given that you are a beginner, I can suggest to keep / and /home separated,
> with additional partitions for swap and Windows. Choose / to be 20GB,
> choose
> swap to be 2GB (it can't hurt, since you have 2GB of physical RAM), and
> choose
> /home to take up all space that remains on the disk, since that is where
> all
> your user data will reside (documents, music, movies, etc.... you want it
> to
> be big enough).Later on, if you choose to reinstall Linux, you just format
> the / partition,
>
and point the new installation to use the old /home (without formatting it),
> thus keeping all your data, customizations etc. across installs. There can
> be
> some nontrivial gotcha's there, but in general it will work better than
> just
> having one big / partititon.
>

This is what the default openSUSE was going to do and I let it go....
However, it is a very basic question but we can boot (or not) from /home
since it is a separate partition...(like /dev/sda1, windows)....?

Many new concepts, really good to know. The only problem with me is that I
am in some other job, so get less time. BUT I liked Linux, anyhow, it is a
great place.

I wonder why Windows was governing the world during a long era and people
readily pay for it.... though Linux is such a great environment....! Isn't
it?

--
THX
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