cant find ramdiskForum: HD Install Topic: cant find ramdisk started by: Micha Posted by Micha on Nov. 13 2006,21:07
Hi,I am just trying to install DSL on an old 486 DX2/66 PC with 16 MB Ram and an 800 MB HDD So far all attempts to install die at the moment, where the system tells: can't find /ramdisk in /etc/fstab afterwards the creation of /ramdisk/tmp fails and then everything goes wrong... the system leaves me alone at the command prompt. Would anyone have a suggestion? Kind regards Michael P.S. that 486 computer doesn't have a CDROM drive but some PCI slots, so I put a USB card inside... the system got cracy with an USB 2.0 Stick inserted, with an USB 1.1 Stick it doesnt complain anymore but the problem above still remains. Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 13 2006,23:17
A memory problem.. try booting with "dsl lowram" first.If there's still problems, you can try "dsl lowram mem=16M" Do you have any shared memory devices? If all fails, check the wiki page on cheatcodes for more info. Posted by skaos on Nov. 14 2006,11:25
You could also try "dsl 2" which boots you into command line and then do a hard disk install from there: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....=16062; >
Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 14 2006,14:35
Heh, I guess I was assuming he was planning on using it as a livecd.If you plan on just installing it first, you can boot with "dsl install" Posted by Micha on Nov. 15 2006,09:37
Yes,i want to install DSL to harddisk indeed. At first I didn't realize that this is not the primary purpose of DSL. Still struggeling with DSL installation for my old 486DX2/66 + 16MB Ram computer. Above suggestion (parameter "install") did not work. The aproach to first partition and format the HD, then start into runlevel 2 and run dslinstall from command line worked up to the moment where the system tries to put files on the HD. I would have two more questions: 1) In the DSL wiki I found the swap partition should be at least 128M. In my previous attempts I was assuming swap size should roughly be double the size of physical mem. Does a 128M swap partition make sense with 16MB physical mem? 2) With that particular computer (the BIOS shows the year 1994 during startup, is there a likely limit to partition size? Kind regards Michael Posted by skaos on Nov. 15 2006,10:58
32-48 MB swap should be more than enough.Partition size: yes and no - dos/win9x (I think) uses the bios to access the disk and some (most?) bioses of that time had a 0.5 or 2 GB disk size limit. Linux doesn't have this limitation as it accesses the hardware directly - the only problem may be with the boot loader (lilo/grub). Then again, I'm no expert ... Posted by fabius79 on Nov. 25 2006,11:54
Hi everyone, all I did was to create the dir /ramdisk/tmp by hand from command line #sudo -s #mkdir /ramdisk/tmp #dsl-hdinstall everything went right!! now I've a fully functional hd installation on my pentiumI 150MHz, 16MB ram, hd 512MB works great! bye |