New Maxtor HD is Bizarre & a Linux question

[World Eater]

Bought the final piece of the puzzle yesterday for my new computer. I've had it up and running for a month or so and aside of a bad dimm of DDR, most of the kinks have been worked out. I have it as a dual boot with win98 on a 3 gig drive, which I use just for gaming, and a 12 gig with winXP, which I use for everything else. I was mindful of what I installed on the machine because I knew I would tear it down and reinstall everything as soon as I got a bigger drive.

So I get a new HD yesterday, a 80 gig Maxtor. While I'm not the supreme master of HDs, I'm very comfortable partitioning and formatting, which I've done dozens of times before. I opened the package and there was a CD bundled with the drive. Thinking this was fairly odd, I opened the booklet which recommended against using FDISK, and to use their Maxblast utility to do the partition and format. I used FDISK on my 40 gig, so to hell with this CD, I'll use FDISK on this new one as well. I install it, set the jumper to CS, and to make a long stupid story short, it's only showing 12 gigs available. I go into bios, and bios is telling me the drive is 81 gigs, so it's not like they stuck the wrong sticker on the drive. I surrender and make a bootable floppy from the CD the provided, but that glitched out on me and said a bunch of files were missing. It was late so I stopped there and will investigate further after work today.

Any advice?

Secondly, once I get this thing up and running, I want to dual boot Linux and XP. I have Redhat 7.3 Valhalla on my other machine, but I was wondering if I should try something newer. Could anyone recommend a version to play with, or is RH 7.3 fine? I was looking at SUSE or DEBIAN, which from my understanding are highly regarded.

[HugoRed]

I used Maxtor's MaxBlast utility on a hard drive and am sorry. Norton cannot optimize this drive because they use a Dynamic Drive overlay and I don't know how to remove it. With newer Windows OS's it is not necessary. I have even formatted and re-installed everything and still the DDO is there. It may be in firmware, I don't know.

[leenmi]

Can't help you with the disk problem. You have tried googling it, right?

About the Linux distro, go to ibiblio.org and try whatever distros look interesting.

Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Redhat - these are good, full featured distros.

With an 80GB drive, there's not much point to a minimalist distro, but I likes them. Peanut is easy to install and has a good mix of applications while staying small. Vector is even smaller. I like it a lot, but it is Slackware based. Nothing wrong with slackware, really, I just don't like it. But I like Vector. It's complicated.

I keep eyeing Yoper (Your Operating System). It looks like a good distro, but there's a glitch in the iso I donwloaded.

Seriously: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/

Have fun

[SpaceDog]

Ah, the exact thing happened to me with my shiny new 80Gb drive a while back. It may have been a Maxtor too, can't remember, but I didn't get a CD.

Anyroads I put it in, fired up FDISK and got the same as you. Odd, thought I, so I fiddled and partitioned and fiddled and stuff. Nope FDISK still thinking it's only 13Gb or so.

I said screw it, assumed FDISK was mental and put in all the sizes as either percentages or 'use the rest of the space' based on the assumptiom that it really was an 80Gb drive. Worked perfectly, I assume that FDISK has some display glitch or something with large drives.

Hope that helps.

SD

[Popup]

I can't help with the HD problem, butI can address this
Originally posted by World Eater
Secondly, once I get this thing up and running, I want to dual boot Linux and XP. I have Redhat 7.3 Valhalla on my other machine, but I was wondering if I should try something newer. Could anyone recommend a version to play with, or is RH 7.3 fine? I was looking at SUSE or DEBIAN, which from my understanding are highly regarded. There's nothing wrong with RH7.3. You've already got kernel 2.4.18, which isn't very far behind the 2.4.20 shipped with RH9. The main difference is in the eye-candy. XFree86 v4.3 supports a bit more fun features, and the newer version of KDE looks gorgeous, but behind the scenes there's not much news.

Another good resource to keep track of linux distributions is distrowatch (http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php?language=EN). They keep an up-to-date list of all major (and several minor) distributions.

[Q.E.D.]

Originally posted by HugoRed
I used Maxtor's MaxBlast utility on a hard drive and am sorry. Norton cannot optimize this drive because they use a Dynamic Drive overlay and I don't know how to remove it. Try this. (http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=B3S3_4Yg&p_lva=&p_faqid=522&p_created=988320874&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTMxJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9MyZwX3Byb2R fbHZsMT03MiZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj03MyZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPX5hbnl_JnBfY2F0X2x2bDI9fmFueX4mcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=)

[rsa]

I recently installed the same drive in my computer and had all sorts of problems, but much of that was due to having an old unsupported BIOS. I'm assuming that you have a recent BIOS that can handle drives over 13GB.

Since your BIOS is reporting that correct size but Windows isn't, I would first try formatting the disk from within Windows rather than using FDISK. I bet that might solve the problem.

[rsa]

BTW, if all else fails, Maxtor has free 800 phone support.

[NutMagnet]

WorldEater

When you have the drive formatted and ready to go, leave it in as the secondary drive and use this freeware.

http://www.xxcopy.com/

After installing it (takes < 1 minute) you open a DOS window from Windows, type in xxcopy c: d: /clone
and it copies everything from your current c: drive to the new drive, including files in use, registry entries, everything. You can still work in Windows while it's running. If you do, run it a second time and it will do an incremental copy of changed files from C: to D:

Shut down the machine, swap the drives, rejumper them and boot.

I've used this on four different occasions and it's never failed.

Be sure to read the section on the website about long filenames, and read the instructions here
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy10.htm
before starting.

[World Eater]

Boy you guys are good, thanks for all the helpful responses. I used Spacedog's technique, and as you all can see, I'm posting right here before your very eyes.

So to recap, one 80 gig drive now with XP on it.
Next up is finding a distro for my 12 gig drive.

One last thing, Lilo or Grub?

[World Eater]

Originally posted by Popup
I can't help with the HD problem, butI can address this
There's nothing wrong with RH7.3. You've already got kernel 2.4.18, which isn't very far behind the 2.4.20 shipped with RH9. The main difference is in the eye-candy. XFree86 v4.3 supports a bit more fun features, and the newer version of KDE looks gorgeous, but behind the scenes there's not much news.

Sorry this confused me a bit. What's XFree86?

[Some Guy]

XFree86 is the version of the X Windowing System that's commonly used with Linux. Essentially, it's the lowest level component of the GUI. KDE and Gnome are desktop environments that sit on top of it. XFree86 4.3 is the current version.

[Nanoda]

X is the window manager. Don't know anything about GRUB - LILO's been what I use on all my machines, some of them pretty odd, and it works okay. Here's one (http://www.galahtech.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5264&st=0&#entry54076) opinion that may be informed.

[Urban Ranger]

GRUB is better than lilo. Much better.

[FyreFiend]

Originally posted by Nanoda
X is the window manager.
<snip>


Nope.
It's a little hard to explain to someone that's only used Windows or MacOS but with Unix the GUI is multi-layered. X (or X-Windows) is the graphics server which is what passes how to draw the graphics to your video card. All your graphical programs have to talk to the X server to get the graphics to the screen.
On top of that you have your window manager which handles how the program windows are drawn and how they're placed on the screen. You can run a graphical program right on top of X but you won't be able to move it when it pops up on the screen.
There are also DEs (Desktop envirments (spelling)) like Gnome or KDE. These give you a desktop like you'd get with Windows or MacOS and usually include a WM (Window Manager), File Manager (like Windows Exporer or Finder), and a bunch of other programs.

You can run programs without X. They all use text only or very crude graphics like old DOS programs. There are also FrameBuffer programs that can do pretty graphics without X but I've never used it so I can't really comment on them.

[World Eater]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
GRUB is better than lilo. Much better.

I'm using GRUB on my old dual boot 98/RedHat box, and everything is peachy. I've heard that Lilo is easier to remove from my MBR then grub, just in case I ever want to take it off. Aside from that GRUB is fine with me.

[World Eater]

Originally posted by FyreFiend
Nope.
It's a little hard to explain to someone that's only used Windows or MacOS but with Unix the GUI is multi-layered. X (or X-Windows) is the graphics server which is what passes how to draw the graphics to your video card. All your graphical programs have to talk to the X server to get the graphics to the screen.
On top of that you have your window manager which handles how the program windows are drawn and how they're placed on the screen. You can run a graphical program right on top of X but you won't be able to move it when it pops up on the screen.
There are also DEs (Desktop envirments (spelling)) like Gnome or KDE. These give you a desktop like you'd get with Windows or MacOS and usually include a WM (Window Manager), File Manager (like Windows Exporer or Finder), and a bunch of other programs.

You can run programs without X. They all use text only or very crude graphics like old DOS programs. There are also FrameBuffer programs that can do pretty graphics without X but I've never used it so I can't really comment on them.

Ok, this is kind of making sense. As I've said before I'm running RH 7.3 on my old comp. It has KDE on it (version 2.0 I think), but I'm unaware of X windows running on it. Do I need a desktop environment and something like XFree86? Or do I run one or the other?

[dylan_73]

No, you're already running X on that machine. KDE runs on X. I would go for a newer distribution, because KDE 3 is a lot nicer than 2.

Oh, and another vote for Grub.

[handy]

" it's only showing 12 gigs available. I go into bios, and bios is telling me the drive is 81 gigs,"

In the future you can try Fdisk & delete any partitions & delete primary Dos partition & start again. If you don't want to do this, use Partition Magic.

Can take care of all this for you:
http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/pmdetails.cfm

"ENHANCE OPERATING SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
PartitionMagic allows you to fine tune your system performance by converting to a more efficient file system, changing cluster sizes, or adding a Linux SWAP file partition."

[World Eater]

Originally posted by dylan_73
No, you're already running X on that machine. KDE runs on X. I would go for a newer distribution, because KDE 3 is a lot nicer than 2.

This is going to sound stupid, but KDE runs on X?

I know any distro I install will do everything for me, (like it did on my last comp), but I would like to understand the underlying machinery here.

I also read those links, and again I've been leaning towards Debian, however I hear the install is hell.

Supposedly Debian and SUSE have more out of the box multimedia support. This is a good thing as I barely even know how to change a directory in the console, let alone install new drivers.

[Hauky]

Originally posted by World Eater
This is going to sound stupid, but KDE runs on X?

On top of, yes. Kind of like... let's say the Google toolbar. It installs into Internet Explorer and enhances it, but without IE, it can't do anything. Without X, KDE (and Gnome and so on) can't do anything, but KDE is still a separate thing.

[dylan_73]

It's a bit difficult to explain. Probably the best way to look at it is to..well...look at it.

If you do a CTRL+ALT+F1 it should take you to a login prompt on a different console. You can switch back with ALT+F7. From the F1 one, log in and type "xinit -- :1" (note, two dashes).

This should give you a bare X, probably running an xterm, and it might by default have twm running. If you click on the background you should see twm If you get nothing you're not running a window manager. Anyway, if you are in twm and you exit it, you'll see what X itself is like. No scroll bars, no menus, no nothing really (you can restart twm by typing "twm &" in an xterm).

KDE just builds on this. It provides a window manager and utilities to create a desktop enviroment.

Anyway, you can switch between the blank X and the KDE one with CTRL+ALT+F7 and CTRL+ALT+F8. Exit the blank X session by hitting CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE and you should be dropped back to the console on F1. Logout and ALT+F7 will take you back to normality.

[Derleth]

The X Windowing System (X) is a very low-level software layer over the graphical hardware (your video card, your network*, and whatever else you physically need to get an image on the screen). It only handles the most basic requests (nothing as complex as windows, even) and relies upon the software that sits on top of it to handle everything else. X hands most keystrokes and mouse actions off to the window manager with one exception: Control-Alt-Backspace (yes, a key chord, like Control-Alt-Delete in the MS-Windows world) will kill X dead, dropping you into a text-only mode.

*Real propeller-heads can run graphical programs installed on a distant machine (yes, with full graphics and everything on the machine they're sitting at) if they can get a network connection and sufficient permissions on the distant machine. (And, of course, X must be running on both systems.) You don't really need to worry about how this works, just know it's an option.

So, what defines what you see? Well, the window manager helps. What does a wm do? Well, it manages the windows. It tells X (not the hardware) how to draw windows and the background and everything else the wm wants. If you want your windows to look a certain way (for example, like MS-Windows draws them, or like NeXTStep draws them), you talk to the wm.

Now, you can do real work. Running just X and a wm is perfectly fine from most viewpoints, but people from an MS or MacOS world will want more. That's where the desktop environment comes in. The DE integrates everything and provides a nice facade over the whole shebang. KDE, for example, provides a standard navigator that doubles as a web browser (kinda like Explorer in MS-Windows, only the KDE version doesn't suck ;)), some basic functions common to most programs (the right-click context menu), and an integrated look and feel.

Now, what can each of these do alone? Diddly-shit. Without X, nothing can talk to the graphical hardware. Without a wm, X can just barely paint a picture on the screen and a DE is truly up shit creek. Without a DE, you can get things done but you probably won't feel truly `at home'. So, out of the three, only the DE is truly expendable. You may find that you don't need a DE, in fact, as I have, but you certainly aren't obligated to give anything up.

[World Eater]

Ah, ok, thanks for all the explanations guys, it's sinking in.