Hi Folks,
I've just acquired a 2nd-hand laptop which has Win98 installed in a single 6GB partition (the entire HDD).
Since this software is not entirely useless (rumours to the contrary notwithstanding) I intend to keep this on say 2GB, making the remaining 4GB over to something really useful (Linux of course). So I shall be fips-ing the partition down to 2GB and then setting up Linux partitions on the remainder. This, as far as it goes, I know how to do.
However, a couple of issues concern me and I'd welcome informed advice from people who've been there before.
1. At present, it seems that the Win98 is set up to look after Virtual Memory (aka swap space) in its own way ("Dear user, please don't get involved in anything as difficult as this ... just leave it to us"). I seem to recall that Windows uses some sort of "hidden file" for swapping out.
Qs: Will I be treading on any toes on this front by cutting back the disk space to the first 2GB in this way? Or will Win98, next time it starts up, simply do its usual swap thing in the space it then finds available? If there would be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
2. I want to keep the power-management ("go to sleep" on inactivity timeout or on pressing the "snooze" button on the machine) available in both Win98 and Linux.
Q: I believe that one of the options is "hibernate to disk", where the system state is saved somewhere on the HDD. This is a similar issue to number 1: what toes would I be treading on?
Q: There is also a converse issue: If I fail to set up the Linux partitions properly, and the laptop writes its system state out to disk when it wants to sleep, could this overwrite something that shouldn't be overwritten? Again, if there could be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 13-Sep-03 Time: 10:16:59 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------