Installing TC to Slave hard drive, Ext4, Grub2. HOW?

[Rich]

Hi KingBongo
The difference is  /mnt/hda1/tce/optional is on your hard drive and  /tmp/tce/optional is in RAM.
As far as the BIOS is concerned try telling it the 30Gb drive is 500Mb, the kernel will figure out
the correct size on it's own. I'm running a machine from 1997 with a 320Gb drive. The machine
didn't like it so I either lied to the bios or disabled it, and let the kernel figure it out since it is
used for file serving.
[Corrected my copy of tinypoodle's typo]

[tinypoodle]

Oomph, that should have read /tmp/tce/optional (instead of /tmp/etc/optional

A typo not free of symantics of context...   

[Original post corrected]

[tinypoodle]

tinypoodle:
Thank you, but that seems like more of the same I am getting tired. I have been trying sooooo many things on this Pentium Devil you wouldn't believe.

Well, the rationale to it is similar to what curaga mentioned in Reply #1, to rely on an OS kernel to correctly recognize a partition which can not be recognized by BIOS.
Basic difference that FreeDOS kernel is much smaller in size and much faster to boot in comparison to Linux kernel.

This would e.g. work for me when having kernel and initrd on USB device with BIOS lacking capability to boot from USB.

[tinypoodle]

Now, what is the difference in having the extensions in, for example, /mnt/hda1/tce/optional (those are the extensions, right?) and copying them to /tmp/tce/optional ? Or am I way off here?

One significant difference is that it is more important that you have swap on when you copy extensions to tmpfs   

[KingBongo]

Rich:
Yes, I am doing exactly that right now. I figured out myself it should work. I disabled the second hard drive in BIOS, installed a HUGE 80Gb drive, and the Linux kernel does the rest Unfortunately (of course), I also had to install everything on the small and slow primary disk then. In the past, I had the most luck with installs on the primary drive, because as I mentioned I have had serious problems with booting. This computer should just work, so I decided to stop playing around and go for the primary drive.

1997 still is too new for my likings

tinypoodle:
Ok, but even if I install FreeDOS (or something similar), the Linux kernel still has to be loaded sooner or later if I intend to use Tiny Core. Or? If the only purpose is to boot into the second hard drive, I think I will skip that for now. But thank you SO much anyway I think it now boots quickly enough to make me happy. I could not measure the time accurately because I have to set up the mouse each time, but I believe it should be under a minute. As a side-note I can mention that when playing around with Puppy, I noticed that booting into hdb instead of hda decreased the boot time with around 20%. Nothing to really care about.

My main concern now is to make it snappy when running, which I think means loading all the important stuff into RAM. As Rich points out "/mnt/hda1/tce/optional" is on hard drive and  "/tmp/tce/optional" is loaded into RAM. Here is my question: "/tmp/tce/optional" is also a directory on the hard drive, but one that gets loaded into RAM/tmpfs automatically when Tiny Core boots up, right? Am I understanding it correctly? Does it have anything to do with the choices of "OnBoot" and "OnDemand"? If you set applications as "OnBoot" are they in "/tmp/tce/optional" already or what?

Don't worry about the swap, I have more than 1Gb of it

[Rich]

Hi KingBongo
Actually, what I had in mind was put the big drive on IDE0:Master and tell the BIOS it's about 500Mb
in size. As long as the files required for booting are in the first 500Mb they will be found. Once
the kernel probes the drive it will figure out the correct size.

[KingBongo]

Rich:
Ah! Man! Never thought about that! I will try it at once. If it works I will get size AND speed

How do I create ext4 partitions instead of ext3? I tried the following two things simultaneously,

1. When creating partitions using "cfdisk" I changed "Type" to "85".

2. I changed the line

"mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1"

in the installation instructions (http://www.tinycorelinux.com/install.html) to

"mkfs.ext4 -I 256 /dev/hda1"

when formatting.

I get no complaints no nothing. Does this create an ext4 partition for me?

[tinypoodle]

Actually, what I had in mind was put the big drive on IDE0:Master and tell the BIOS it's about 500Mb
in size.

How exactly would you go about "telling" the BIOS so?

[Rich]

Hi tinypoodle
On a machine that old the BIOS setup page let's you specify the size of the hard drive.

[tinypoodle]

Ah ok, if such specific BIOS options exist of course that could be a good idea.
Just that personally I have never happened to stumble upon any similar BIOS options, not even in BIOS older than that.

[Rich]

Hi tinypoodle
Most of them would give you a choice of about 30 horribly outdated drive sizes and a choice of
user defined. The best bet is to read the CHS information from the label of the drive and use the
same number of heads and sectors and lie about the number of cylinders using user defined.

@KingBongo: For what it's worth, I've been using EXT3 for the last couple years and despite the
20-30 power glitches/outages I get every year it's performed flawlessly. The mkfs utility may be
one of those programs that completes silently unless you use a command line switch to tell it
otherwise. Type  mkfs.ext3 --help  and it should list it's options.

[KingBongo]

Rich:
OH MAN! IT WORKS SOOOO GOOD! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!

I installed directly to an 30Gb drive. I left the parameters in BIOS the same as for the 1.3Gb drive, and IT WORKS! I will do it again for the 80Gb drive later.

By the way, do NOT try the shit I did when trying to create ext4 partitions. At least Grub Legacy doesn't understand wtf I did, hahaha. It probably went all wrong. Actually I don't want to use ext4 just because it is more modern or something. I want to use it because I seem to remember that on average it is actually faster than ext2/ext3.

[Rich]

Hi KingBongo
Glad I could help.
I used grub legacy to dual boot a laptop with Tinycore. Initially I couldn't boot into the XP partition
anymore. The problem was a missing space on one of the parameters, which grub silently failed on.
I told it
root(hd0,0)
instead of
root (hd0,0)
Drove me nuts trying to figure out what was wrong.

[curaga]

Our grub does have ext4 support, so unless your drive had grub from elsewhere, it should just work.

[KingBongo]

curaga:
Thank you. But I still don't understand how to create ext4 partitions to begin with. The TC documentation really is slim at times. I also would like to install GRUB2 just because I can, but same thing there, slim documentation