User Feedback :: can't install dsl on hard drive



Thanks very much for your advice.  

I did what you said; no luck - got "error 25" upon booting with grub.
Searching the internet for a while I figured out that I need to change CMOS settings in the BIOS to list the HD as "LBA".  (I know this is probably obvious to Linux people, but believe me it's completely non-obvious to the casual user!)  Setting the HD as LBA allowed me to advance to the next stumbling block:   finally I could begin to boot from the HD!

After booting, grub came up, asking me to select some configuration options.  I chose what seemed the best choices in each case - sometimes prompted by grub. In the end I had to set monitor res and bit depth. I think I selected 1024 x ? and 16 bits -  I'm afraid I didn't record all my choices.  At the end of this process the monitor turned itself off and remained black. I suspect I may have erred in my choice of monitor resolution or bit depth.

On the next boot from HD I was told I could change settings with xsetup.sh and even received a prompt (the dsl windows didn't start up) but at the prompt this didn't work.

On the next boot nothing worked at all.

Back to the CD boot.

I thought I'd try lilo instead, so went back do dsl-hdinstall and redid the entire install, this time selecting lilo.  Now when I boot from the HD, to my surprise, I still get grub. This time it gives me "error 15".  Why is grub still around? I thought I'd cleaned the slate, so to speak.

The process is rather involved!  In particular I don't understand why it's so easy to mis-set setup options when booting from the HD (I suspect this is my problem) while booting from a CD is such a snap (I never had to specify any options for my monitor when booting from CD - it just worked).
It's a part of the first-time-install configuration to ask you for your preferred resolution.

Installing lilo should have cleaned the slate - I have no idea why grub persisted. Also, the bootloader only handles things upto "booting the kernel", so if you get to that point, the bootloader has worked fine, so you should probably reinstall with grub.

Did you choose Xvesa or Xfbdev? This is another "try the other one" thing, where one might work better than the other.

If you'd like an explanation for your LBA problem, it's because the bios is too old to boot without LBA enabled.
Writing LILO to the MBR *after* GRUB does *not* automatically overwrite GRUB. You can zero out your MBR and then repartition with ©fdisk. If you do it exactly as it is now, you should only need to install GRUB or LILO and not go through a complete reinstall.

I don't like reinstalling as a first resort -- not even as a second or third. I try to recover rather than reinstall. There are too many issues that occur and you lose whatever effort and time you already invested. The best practice, IMO, is always to figure out what's going on before reinstalling and see if you can recover from whatever problem. That way you learn and know exactly what's going on so you can recover both now and in the future instead on repeating and/or compounding whatever errors put you in any given position.
Quote (lucky13 @ May 05 2008,15:03)
Writing LILO to the MBR *after* GRUB does *not* automatically overwrite GRUB. You can zero out your MBR and then repartition with ©fdisk. If you do it exactly as it is now, you should only need to install GRUB or LILO and not go through a complete reinstall.

Thanks to both of you for all this advice.

So how exactly do I "zero out my MBR"?
Then I will redo everything & "try the other one" when grub initializes...

btw, I know the BIOS is old...the computer is old too. But my position is that many useful computers are being retired because they can't run the latest Windows - while the computer manufacturers profit and the environment suffers.  The beauty of DSL, in my opinion, is that it assumes so little. I'm trying to get many more miles out of an admittedly "old" (meaning:  > 3 years) computer (it's really not so old; we expect refrigerators to work for 20 years; why not computers?) with only 4 gig HD and very little memory - but it's just fine for so many tasks.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

zeroes the MBR out for you.
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