Newbie ?'s

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Newbie ?'s
started by: bigfuzzyjesus

Posted by bigfuzzyjesus on Mar. 02 2006,21:11

Ok, I have a 900 MHZ Pentium Celeron; Ran DSL Live-CD Great. Now I want to do a frugal HD install... I have a 20gb Master Drive and a 10gb Slave. And this is where the questions begin.

I had Ubuntu installed on the 20gb drive and now I want to wipe the drive. I am running on a DSL HD install right now but I do not know how to save my settings / create partitions. cfdisk comes up with un error until I enter cfdisk hda1. There are no windows partitions and only linux partitions from ubuntu (i dont know if they're still there). When I write partitions for Swap and mydsl etc. I cannot write the partitions. It says it writes them but it doesnt. And I also dont know how to tell the difference between HD's. Because i want to install on 10GB HD; But what is hda1 is it my master or slave and if its my master whats my slave...

!!!!all in all I just want to wipe both my HD's completely (including partions) and figure out which HD is which...!!!!

Posted by larkl on Mar. 02 2006,23:35

Hda should be the master (if it's on the first cable - most likely), hdb is the slave. The first partition on the master is hda1, second is hda2. First partition on slave is hdb1 etc. Not sure why the partitions are not "writing" as you put it. Are you letting cfdisk write the partition table to the drive before you leave it?

Posted by sheldonisaac on Mar. 03 2006,02:21

> !!!all in all I just want to wipe both my HD's completely > (including partions) and figure out which HD is which...!!!

---------------

Maybe this:

Boot from the live CD of DSL.

Press f2 when the penguin appears (I think)

At the boot prompt, enter:

dsl vga=normal 2 norestore base

When you get a command shell prompt,
try this:

fdisk /dev/hda

m (tells you what keys do what)

p (shows all the partitions on the drive)

d (it'll ask which partition to delete)

tell it the number, eg 1 , meaning you want to delete the first primary partition on that drive

keep going until there are no partitions on that drive.

Then press

w

to write the changes to the disk.

tell it reboot, and again boot from the liveCD.
Again go to a command prompt.

fdisk /dev/hda, and see if all the old partions are gone.

When they are, create one or more new ones, and write the changes to disk.

Then mke2fs /dev/hda1 or whatever.
(Or, just boot to the GUI, and use a menu option to do, for example, a frugal grub install.)

You can wipe the 2nd hard drive with a similar method, ie fdisk /dev/hdb

If you're not sure which drive is which, do dmesg | more from a command prompt