Other Help Topics :: Can't mount hard drive

I made a fairly huge mistake recently with my hard drive. I've been experimenting with DSL on an old laptop I had lying around, and had some trouble getting a swap file to work. I eventually got really tired of messing around with the included utility, and tried to do some manual work with the terminal. After doing this, and not getting any results, I just gave up. But when restarted my computer the next time, the hard drive did not show up on the auto-mount interface, or any other area that I could think of to look. When it's booting up, it says something along the lines of "Using swap partition: hda1," and in /etc/fstab there's a line that says "/dev/hda1 none swap," and some other stuff I can't remember. If any one can make some sense of that, it would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Check "sudo fdisk -l /etc/hda" to see if your swap drive is listed. I believe it should be formated to 82 Linux.

The /etc/fstab read seems about right. On mine it's "/dev/hda2 none swap defaults 0 0"

Edit: also, run "dmesg | grep swap" On mine: "Adding Swap: 2097136k swap-space (priority -1)"

It doesn't sound like anything is wrong here, unless hda1 is not your intended swap partition. The swap is not supposed to appear in the mount interface, since it is not used as a file system.

Well, the thing is, hda1 was the only partition on the hard drive. See, I just expected that the manual commands would do something similar to the DOS swapfile utility. I didn't realize it would make the whole partition a swap partition. And I haven't installed DSL yet. I've just been booting with the live cd, and saving my settings through backups on the existing FAT32 partition. Anyway, I think I'm going to take the dive and reformat the hard drive with cfdisk, and do a frugal install. Wish me luck.

Okay, so I tried to install DSL, and when I did the menu option for a Grub frugal install, this is what it gave me:

Code Sample

Formatting /dev/hda1
mke2fs 1.34-WIP (21-May-2003)
/dev/hda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
mount: can't find /mnt/hda1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
Setting up system image on /mnt/hda1
cp: writing `/mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX': No space left on device
cp: writing `/mnt/hda1/boot/./linux24': No space left on device
cp: writing `/mnt/hda1/boot/./minirt24.gz': No space left on device
Setting up grub
: Not found or not a block device.
umount /dev/hda1: not mounted
Grub Installation Completed

What in the world is going on here?

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