I’m currently running Windows 2000 Pro on one big NTFS partition on my hard drive. Because my drive is fairly large (80 GB), I’d like to partition it using Partition Magic and install Suse Linux 9.0 onto the second partition. I’m thinking of making the Windows partition about 30 or 35 GB and then making the rest of the drive Linux. The question I have deals with cylinder 1024. Some people have told me that I can simply make my two partitions with Partition Magic, and then install LILO to the MBR and this will allow for my dual booting option. Others tell me I need to create a /boot directory below cylinder 1024 in order to have Linux boot correctly. To me, it’d be easier to just make a second partition and tell Linux to put itself there and then install LILO into the MBR so it’s initialized by the BIOS when the computer starts, but I’m not sure if this’ll work as I’m new to Linux. Perhaps the 1024 cylinder problem doesn’t exist in newer versions of Suse? I’d be installing 9.0. Anyone have any advice?

I've never followed the "rule" of installing /boot below cylinder 1024. Typically I have my 40GB NTFS partition as hda1, swap as hda2, and / as hda3. I suggest you just install GRUB (or LILO if you wish) to the MBR and give it a try.

The 1024 limit really only refers to the use of INT13 disk I/O routines and CHS (Cylinders, Heads & Sectors) encoded in 3 bytes (which cannot address more than 8.5Gb). The cylinders part uses 10 bits which range from 0 to 1023. These days Extended INT13 functions and 16-byte disk address packets are used and you shouldn't have a problem unless installing an old distro.