Misc probs

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Misc probs
started by: IDK

Posted by IDK on April 19 2006,16:59

I get an error when running fdisk...
Unable to open /dev/hda

It worked the day before yeasterday, but now it's broke.
I've tried whatever I could think of.

Then to the second thing:
Is it possible to change the screen update rate.
I don't like having it on 60Hz. It flickers.

Thanks for your time helping a newbie on linux (installed dsl a week ago)

Niklas Ulvinge aka IDK wishes you happy programming if you're a programmer and happy times to all else.

Posted by doobit on April 19 2006,17:56

The 60hz rate is pretty much fixed with the xvesa drivers. You would need to download and install a bigger X driver package for a different refresh rate. I think some people have been having success with Xorg, so do a search on that.

is /dev/hda mounted?

Posted by mikshaw on April 19 2006,19:23

Mounting won't help, and is actually not recommended. fdisk and its relatives are run on the drive itself rather than the mountpoint, so IDK had it right. The only thing I can think of is perhaps the command was not run as root? Regular users cannot fdisk.

Posted by doobit on April 19 2006,19:56

Yes, that's true. I was asking as a way of analyzing the problem. I'm not positive and have no way to rest it here, but I believe cfdisk will also not write to the partition that you booted from (which is a good safety feature). You would need to boot from the live CD or a pendrive, open a terminal as root and run
# cfdisk /dev/hda

Posted by lovdsl on April 20 2006,09:26

Yes.and.in this case it usually notes that it can not access the drive..drive mounted

Posted by IDK on April 20 2006,12:46

Thanks, that solved it.

Now I've encountered two other probs:

How do I format and mount for example hda4?
How do I mount a swapdisk?

Posted by doobit on April 20 2006,12:54

To format a partition you can use a format command form the command line. Depending on what file system you want to use, there are different commands. Here is a good link about that:

< http://www.lissot.net/partition/ >

The swap partition can be formatted as swap, but can also be left empty as long as the swap flag is on. You need to turn swap on with the command swapon, but usually the OS does this as it boots as long as it recognizes that you have a swap partition.

Posted by IDK on April 20 2006,13:21

Thanks for the quick reply

I have a swap, but on the desktop it says:
Swap Used: 0/0 - %

So I did mkswap -c /dev/hda3 and swapon /dev/hda3 and it works.

I haven't tested if it will work after reboot.

The link describe very well how to make partitions, but how do I mount one?

Also, is there any good site for linux beginners or a description of the linux system?

Posted by doobit on April 20 2006,13:31

FYI, the swap will only be used in cases where an application needs more memory to run than you actually have in RAM.
You can mount a partition, as super user or root with the mount command like this:

Code Sample

sudo su
mount /dev/hda7

To unmount use:

Code Sample

umount /dev/hda7

Notice it's "umount" not "unmount"
A way that is easier for beginners to remember in DSL is to right click on Emelfm and choose as super user. Navigate to the /mnt directory and open it. There will be a list of your media partitions there. Right click on the one you want to mount and choose mount.