Dual Operating System Success (FINALLY!)

I posted back on January 7 regarding my attempts to get a version of Mandrake Linux 9.2 running on my computer. Because I had a tiny hard drive, it took the offer of a free second hard drive to make it possible for this to happen. I met my friend Doug on Friday night, January 9, in order to get the new disk installed and perform my Linux install there with the benefit of another computer handy. I should say at this point that the new disk was a SCSI disk, which will become very important later. We got the disk and the controller card in and were soon running the Linux install. However, the install took a long time, and when it came to the point of configuring X and LILO it began to crash. We tried it a second time and again the install got bogged down. By this time it was 1:00 a.m., Doug had to be somewhere in the morning, and Jennifer was on the floor asleep. I had to pack it in.

Over the weekend I tried numerous times to get the install to work. I got to the point where I could actually get Linux to boot up, but X kept crashing. I discovered that the X libraries had somehow become corrupted during the install. I burned off a new set of Mandrake discs, in case I had incorrectly burned the first set, and still had the same problems. Finally, on a whim, I did a minimal install on the empty portion of my IDE drive. This time, the install went incredibly fast, and within fifteen minutes I had a working install up and running. I attempted to query some online resources at this point, but without any response, my only assumption is that the data transfer rate between the IDE channel and the SCSI channel is so slow on my motherboard that files get corrupted in the process.

What I ended up doing was splitting the SCSI disk in half. I have all my application files for Linux on the IDE drive, while my /home and /var directories and my swap space reside on my SCSI. The remainder of the SCSI contains a FAT32 Windows partition that holds my mp3's, which I can actually mount and access in Linux. The SCSI FAT32 partition is also a handy medium for getting some of my shared files from Windows to Linux, such as contacts and appointments out of Outlook and the like.