The reason for this is that IIRC, if you want to boot OS it needs be on
primary partition, and you are limited to either 4 primary and no extended
parititions or 3 primary and "many" partitions in extended partition
Now if you create linux box,
you first create a small HDA1 being dos partition (depending on size of
you hdd it would be anything from 30-100mb), you would use it for
brain-dead drivers which require dos (and even sometimes win) to setup
the card (NIC,etc), to flash bios etc and finally to use w/ dosemu -- no
you don't want kill yourself w/ floppies :) -- such paritition is very
handy instead of searching for floppies each time and then having to boot
from them and then working at speeds of XT w/ turbo :)
Then you probably will want followd other unixes and create
second paritition, HDA2, being the root directory for linux,
it is up to your taste how much to put there, I did allocate 250mb
what is a bit of overkill.
then you create swap HDA3,
at this point you have used the 3 primary partitions, so you now create
HDA4 being extended parition and in it you create
and then other partitions like /home (HDA5) /usr (HDA6) /var (HDA7)
w/ 2gb, 3gb and 1.1 gb respectively.
Now my problem is that I have forgotten that it is Linux not
some-other-unix, so parition size is limited to 128mb and I allocated for
swap 160mb so effectively around 30mb is unfortunatelly being unused. and
I can't change it w/out dumping everything reparitioning and then restore.
BTW: any chances for path for ultra-dma for 2.0.31? I have both ultra-DMA
hdd and MB w/ TX chipsets, but I would rather to run 2.0.x instead of
2.1.x
-Adam