USB booting :: Formatting HD after penboot



OK I had a 4gig ide hd with hda1 100mb bootable, 1gig swap, and hda3 3gig

I booted on my pen drive and opened ATerminal as root
after cfdisk deleting all partitions and making one 4gig ext3 bootable partition (mkfs.ext /dev/hda1)
The hda1 appears in the file system and in the mount tool. I clicked so there was a green "mounted" button in the file tool.

Then trying to download linux documentation and selecting the /mnt/hda1 partition to download to I get "cannot create file directory /mnt/hda1 is not writable"
you need the -j switch (journaling) to make it ext3. Like mke2fs -J /dev/hda1 , or using the script mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 I don't know if the script is included in DSL though so I have always used the first option. Here is a manpage on the subject:

http://www.netadmintools.com/html/8mke2fs.man.html
Quote (doobit @ Mar. 22 2006,08:45)
you need the -j switch (journaling) to make it ext3. Like mke2fs -J /dev/hda1 , or using the script mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 I don't know if the script is included in DSL though so I have always used the first option. Here is a manpage on the subject:

http://www.netadmintools.com/html/8mke2fs.man.html

I used mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1

The process went on without any warnings or errors.
Did you do the saving as "root" or as a regular user. Sometimes regular users don't have the writing permission for mounted drives. (writing permission is given in /etc/fstab file..)

And I think 1GB swap partition is quite big for a 4GB hard disk!!
Maybe it would be a good idea to NOT have a swap partition at all in such a small disk!!! I would make the linux partition 1GB bigger and use a swap file, which size would be easy to change if you need more space...

And IGB for swap is too much anyway. I have 512MB of ram and usuallu I have 256MB for swap which has always been enough.

The old "rule" to make swap 2x actual RAM is to much when you have 512MB of ram And if you have 1024MB of RAM you dont need swap at all!
I just tried a "workaround". From Firefox I downloaded to /tmp then opened Emelfm as superuser and copied from /tmp to /mnt/hda1. That seems to have worked but that sucks to have to make such a twity set of steps...

BTW i opened a terminal and typed sudo su
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