I am currently running Windows 98 on a PIII 450Mhz machine with 128Mb RAM 12Gb hard drive, etc. I have partitioned 75% of my harddisk as FAT32 and installed Win98 on that portion, leaving roughly 3Gb for Linux (plenty?). I am trying to install Linux 6.2 (boxed-set) on my machine. I have tried the workstation option, but it insists on me manually partitioning the hard-disk, as does the custom option, although that's supposed to. When i try and add the 16Mb /boot partition it wont let me continue - it produces a messagebox saying that the boot partition is too big; it's only 16Mb, definatly. All i want to add is a 16Mb /boot partition, a 128Mb swap partition and just fill the rest of the disk with the /root partition. I tried deleting the Windows 98 (FAT32) partition and adding the /boot partition again, and it worked fine! However, i want to be able to use both OS's. Why does it say that the /boot partition is too big when the primary partition is the 75% FAT32, but works fine when i remove it? I also tried installing linux first using 3Gb and then installing Win98 on the secondary partition (It would only let me make the FAT32 a 4Gb partition as it was secondary). Afterwards, typing "linux" from the LILO boots linux, but when typing "dos" from LILO i got the 0x00 error message so i cant load Win98 that way either. I'm out of ideas now :o) Can you help?
The error message is somewhat misleading. The problem is most likely that when you had the Windows partition on your drive that the only available free space on the drive to allocate the /boot partition was on a drive cylinder above the 1024 limit that BIOS imposes for partitions you can boot off of. When you deleted Windows then the /boot partition could be allocated under the 1024 cylinder limit and it worked. Hopefully in the future we will be able to boot from cylinders greater than 1024.