Separate Partitions

I finally got my beast machine set up and running. As you may recall, I was having quite the battle with it, as it ferociously fought my attempts to use hard drives with a capacity greater than 137gb. I returned the generic CompUSA RAID ATA133 controller card for a name brand (Belkin) plain ol' ATA133 card. It cost US$50, which seems a little excessive. I could have picked up something similar online for less, but it sure is nice to just return or exchange something if it doesn't work, rather than wait for the mail to do its thing. And it only came with one "Ultra ATA" cable, instead of the two that came with the CompUSA card, so it was lucky I had a couple of them hanging around here.

But at least this installation went exactly as planned - plug the card in, plug each drive into the controller card, turn on the computer and see three different hard drives, two of which have 160gb capacity. Yay! So I split one of them up into 4 40gb partitions, so I can play with various installations. I installed the latest and greatest PC-BSD (1.3 RC1) on one partition and it went off without a hitch.

I then tried to install Ubuntu on the next partition and while the installation went fine, the default setup overwrote my BootIT NG boot loader. So I had to re-install that and now I had the problem where it wouldn't boot the Ubuntu partition. I thought the Ubuntu installer was also a little finicky when it came to picking a partition to install into. Unlike the new PC-BSD installer, you couldn't just pick a partition and say install into that. You had to set it up correctly yourself. And Linux needs two partitions at least (one for / and one for swap), so if you already have the max 4 primary partitions, it gets kinda tricky. BootIT NG actually has an option to allow more than four primary partitions, but as it ties you to committing to BootIT NG to handle all the partition work, I haven't dared experiment with it.

So that means you have to know enough to set up an extended partition with two volumes. But even after I did that, the final installation screen wasn't very clear about where it want to install the GRUB loader, with just a subtle "GRUB: (hd0)" prompt in the middle of the page. What I should have done, I think, is to change the (hd0) to be (hd2,4), which says to install it on the third (0,1,2) hard drive, first extended partition (I guess GRUB starts at 4 for all extended partitions). But I didn't know that until recently, thanks to some expert Knowledge Base articles on the Terabyte Unlimited web site: Knowledge Base: Linux

So after I re-installed BootIT NG, I had to figure out how to get the GRUB loader installed into the new Ubuntu partitions. Here's how I had it set up:

1. 20gb boot hard drive


2. 160gb hard drive, with two NTFS 80gb primary partitions


3. 
   
   
   
   1. 40gb PC-BSD partition (actually, a "slice" in BSD parlance)
   
   
   2. Extended partition with:
      
      
      
      1. 38gb Linux
      
      
      2. 2gb Linux Swap
      
      
      
      
   
   
   3. 40gb empty partitions
   
   
   4. 40gb empty partitions
   
   
   
   
   

So, using the BootIT NG advice, I booted the Ubuntu installation CD (which, luckily, doubles as a Live CD), opened a terminal window and the partition editor. The partition editor showed me that my 3rd hard drive, 2nd partition was called "hdg5" (sic). So, in the console window:


$ sudo mount /dev/hdg5 /mnt

$ sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hdg5



This might not be the most efficient way of doing it, but it worked. I couldn't get grub-install to work if I just said grub-install /dev/hdg5, as it complained about not being accessible. I guess it can't write to it directly, but rather needs to get at the /boot folder. After doing this, I could finally select the logical partition in BootIT and I can now boot Ubuntu and play with GNOME. I like how it asks if you want to update stuff at boot time. I think that is an important next step for PC-BSD to take.