User Feedback :: Why do I still do regular HD installs of DSL?

clivesay - thanks for the quick response. I ask this question because I seem to have trouble preserving my passwd file. I add user dsl and provide a passwd and add /etc/passwd to .filetool.lst but I seem to have to do it again after a reboot. Maybe there is another file that I need to preserve.

I don't have a CD or USB port on my ancient DSL machine (laptop). I do my HD install from a windoze partition and floppy drive. I do have a zip100 parallel port drive that I could use, but I don't want to carry the zip around with my laptop. HD install seems like the easiest way to go for me. I always thought I was doing a frugal install, but since I am not keeping the DSL iso image on my dos partition after I install DSL to my hard drive, I guess I am not.

This thread would suggest that I might be better off keeping the iso (after I get it the way I want it) on the DOS partition and not having much more than a linux swap paritition on the HD?

I tried frugal first. I liked the idea a lot. I have a p3 700 with 192 mb RAM and at first everything seemed toasty. But once I started adding on extensions, and rebooting I started having problems for some reason. X would lock up every few minutes. I couldn't get wesnoth to play without crashing and closing up a few minutes into things. open office from uci took a long time to boot and would hang for a short while every few keystrokes for about two minutes after booting.
So now I'm trying hard drive install. So far so good, with none of the problems I experienced with frugal. My greatest surprise- running off the hard drive feels about as fast as running off memory with toram enabled on frugal.

I have been using HD install, basicly because it was supposedly close to a real Debian install, and I love Debian.

This frugal install sounds great, I might try it soon.

I have one problem with DSL, my laptop has a hibernat mode, which when it was new the windoze OS was partioned with a 256mg partion for this function. Which basicly wrote memory to this partion then when wokeup it would retrun this back to memory.

This partion is long since gone, and no OS has funtioned properly with hidernat since.

But my problem with DSL is if it gets into habernat mode, as with other OSes I have to pull the plug and reboot. But DSL HD install reboots with numores erros and fails falling back to command line.

Pull the plug again and reboot the second time it boots fine.

My question, Why does it error out? I beleive it's because the file system wasn't unmounted correctly. But since it does error out on frist try, why does it boot fine the second try? that makes no since to me.

I don't know if anyone touched on these points but, I did a HD installs for 2 reasons.
1) Its a laptop and only has 1 CD ROM which I want to use for mp3's and jpg's.
2)can't do USB install becuase my BIOS does not support USB boot and there is something wrong with my USB ports/controller.

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