[vox] To Re-install or not to Re-install...That is the Question

["John C. Alden" <jcalMAPSden@ucdavis.edu>]

THE SETUP

Old system:

        "cracked" several-year-old 4Mb P-90 running Mandrake (no CD-ROM)

        (All ISA inside, if that gives you a clue...)

New[er] system:

        Pentium-166, 128Mb machine, using Red Hat 7.2, HDDs: 7.2G, 4.3Gb

        Award BIOS is updated as far as it can be.

Re-using original disk in new system (supposedly formatted upon install), and I'm having a disk size problem. I'm trying to decide whether to reinstall or not.

                                * * *

Medium Problem #1.

/dev/hda (Maxtor 90720D5) is supposed to be 7.2Gb

Using AUTO and LBA, it shows on boot:

        LBA Mode 4, 7203Mb

or, in the BIOS IDE auto-detect:

        7197Mb.

So, 7Gb, give or take, right?.

But fdisk and Disk Druid reported it at 2.008Gb.

Now that RH's installed, parted says 2.014Gb.

Since I had an extra 4.3Gb disk as /dev/hdc, I installed anyway.

Minor Problem #2.

After the install and reboot, an EZ-BIOS (!) config screen appears before the GRUB menu.

Whaaa..? Where did EZ-BIOS come from? RedHat didn't add this, did it? Naaaa. It must be left over from the previous MBR (old BIOS needed it, perhaps).

I had thought the MBR would have been re-written by GRUB.

Medium Problem #3.

If I just leave it alone, it boots into Linux fine, except there's something missing:

        the /home partition!!!

Dang. In all the commotion, with the other custom RAID partitions they wanted, I forgot to add in /home. Well, it's currently under /, but with /'s 300Mb partition total (at 33% use, no user files), it doesn't look good for the home dir expanding all that much.

OPTIONS, ANYONE?

Given that there's no user data on the system yet, would you:

1. leave it alone, and hope 184Mb is enough for the

    4-5 students doing software development in /home?

2. reformat all and re-do it, hoping the true size will appear

    in fdisk/Disk Druid?

3. add a new partition for /home with mkfs, etc., fix /etc/fstab,

    and ignore the EZ-BIOS apparition?

4. Re-write the MBR and hopefully trash EZ-BIOS, reclaiming the space?

(this sounds like a recipe for disaster, actually, given disk geometry mechanics)

Thanks, and sorry for the long-winded description.

--john

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John C. Alden, jcalden@ucdavis.edu      530-754-7210
Programmer-Analyst III                  530-304-7443 cell
Department of Applied Science   530-752-0360 (front desk)
University of California, Davis 530-752-2444 fax
http://www.das.ucdavis.edu/
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