Bad Partition??

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Bad Partition??
started by: Deeeebs

Posted by Deeeebs on Nov. 24 2006,21:58

Ok I am a total Noob when it comes to Linux. I do tech support for MS platforms and have seen a couple people using DSL on old laptops. So I figured I would install it on my old PII system.

System Config;

Intel PII 400Mhz 512 Cache
392MB Ram
WD 20GB Master Dive (XP Professional)
WD 20GB Slave Drive (IT WANTS DSL BAD!!!!)
3DFX VooDoo 5500 64MB Video Card
Linksys 10/100 Lan Card
HP 9300i Cd Burner

Ok so now that you know what I am working with its time for the problem.

I did have DSL on my master drive but I want XP to be master. So now that I have XP on my master drive I am trying to install DSL on my slave drive.

When I boot from the DSL Live CD I opened EmelFM in super user mode. Then I clicked on the "X" Xterm button in the lower right hand corner. In the Xterm box it shows root@box:~#: So from there I ran the cfdisk command and it olnly shows HDA1 Boot Primary NTFS. NO HDB1!!! So then I typed in cfdisk /dev/hdb1 and I get an error stating:

"FATAL ERROR: Bad Primary Partition 0: Primary Partition begins after end-of-disk. Press any key to exit cfdisk."

Aslo When I fdisk /dev/hdb1 I get this:

"The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2432.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger then 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old veriosns of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)"

ANYONE have ANY IDEAS?

BTW I did format this slave drive in windows XP to NTFS and it had no problems or errors when formatting the drive.

Thanks
Deeeebs

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 24 2006,22:25

Try to use the physical device for partitioning, not the partition itself (although you can do that i think but it's not really supported) - which means "cfdisk /dev/hdb". Running just cfdisk will target /dev/hda. You could even run fdisk -l to see all of them.

Posted by Deeeebs on Nov. 24 2006,22:54

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Nov. 24 2006,17:25)

Thanks that worked great. But now I have another problem. DSL full hd install completed but bootloader lilo not working. System boots to windows xp by default. Any way for Lilo to pop up and ask if I want to go into windows or DSL?

During the install after it asked if I wanted to install a boot loader and i Chose yes for Lilo. Then I saw where it wrote to the MBR on HDA1 which is my Xp drive but it still defaults to windows.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 24 2006,23:15

It probably wrote to the mbr on /dev/hdb

So you'll either boot off hdb or do some other workaround (theres a couple floating around these forums too).

Posted by Deeeebs on Nov. 24 2006,23:21

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Nov. 24 2006,18:15)

It probably wrote to the mbr on /dev/hdb

So you'll either boot off hdb or do some other workaround (theres a couple floating around these forums too).

No I'm pretty sure that it wrote to HDA1 thats what it said it was doing.

Should I just do it the other way? Put DSL on the master drive (HDA1) and windows xp on the slave drive (HDB1)?

and if I do it that way which one should be installed first? Windows? so that way when linux is installed and installs the boot loader it can see windows is there?

I dont mind starting over its a spare system.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 24 2006,23:40

well, I took a look at the script and it looks like it installs lilo to the disk's mbr that it is installing DSL to by default.

Anyways, it doesn't matter how you do it, through your switching your boot order via bios, switching slave/master/physically, reinstalling, or which o/s is first. You could even boot linux off the windows bootloader. And of course lilo/grub can boot windows in return (I personally recommend grub, btw).