Installing to HD and cfdisk errors
Forum: HD Install
Topic: Installing to HD and cfdisk errors
started by: Grogley
Posted by Grogley on May 11 2008,18:25
I am trying to create DSL dedicated BOINC machine by installing DSL on an older system. I have managed to do this before about a year ago but am having trouble doing this again. I am using the latest DSL v4.2.5. I am mostly a Linux/Unix neophyte so keep that in mind. Also note that I am only going to install DSL on this disk, so I don't need to have different partitions for DOS/WIN or whatever.So I have tried using a standard disk install and a frugal install but there is some disconnect with the disk itself. After reading a lot of posts in this forum that are related to my problems, I think my biggest problem is that the disk isn't partitioned correctly. I initially created a DOS partition with fdisk on the disk to install to. However, that installation failed. I am not sure why this failed since all appeared to finish normally but the system wouldn't boot.
So I tried many other install types like the frugal install and it fails because it says there is no disk to install to.
So then reading here, I thought I would try to partition the disk with cfdisk. When I start cfdisk, it immediately comes up with an error that says "Fatal Error: cannot open disk drive". I even tried "cfdisk -z /dev/hda" as suggested by others.
So at this point I need some help to figure out what is happening. If I can't get the partition right, I think that I will not be able to do the install.
Thanks in advance for your help
Rod
Posted by curaga on May 11 2008,18:59
Seems your disk drive is not the ide master in the first channel (hda), nothing too harmful.Use "dmesg | grep hd" in a terminal to find out which device it is, you should see something like this:
| Quote |
| hda: HITACHI_DK23CA-20, ATA DISK drive hda: max request size: 128KiB hda: 39070080 sectors (20003 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63<6>hda: hw_config=600b hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 |
This is the output on my current laptop, saying my disk is hda and has four partitions.
Posted by Grogley on May 11 2008,19:26
Thanks for the reply.I tried your suggestion to check for what drives are used but the command "dmesg |grep hd" returns nothing. It is as if the drives are not there. If I boot DOS, I can fdisk this drive and format it and it will boot DOS.
I am pretty sure that my drive is configured for the master drive on the IDE. However, I did check the drive and my mother board was not recognizing the correct number of sectors/cylinders etc. I modified these to be correct and tried again but with the same result.
Other thoughts? Thanks again.
Rod
Posted by curaga on May 12 2008,14:06
Okay, then read the output of dmesg through and see if there are any clues to why your drive isn't recognized. It's also available in "System stats" in the Control Panel, with a scroll bar 
Posted by Grogley on May 12 2008,17:00
I think I solved my problem. First problem I think was that one needs to be root to run cdfdisk, but one isn't told it is a permissions problem, cfdisk just gives an error. Once I figured that out, I was able to see the disk and partition it. Once that was done, the install proceeded normally.
Now I am trying to figure out how to change the hostname, which the Wiki helped me on but I forgot to update the KNOPPIX config thing. I'll get to that tonight. Also, I am trying to get real VNC server to work on boot up (like the Winodws variant) but I get no options to run it as a service or daemon or whatever DSL calls it.
Thanks for your help.
Rod
Posted by lucky13 on May 12 2008,17:58
| Quote |
| Now I am trying to figure out how to change the hostname |
You wrote above that you did a frugal install, so you only have to use the host= bootcode (add it to the line with other options in your menu.lst).
Posted by Grogley on May 12 2008,18:31
Actually, I ended up doing the install to disk option at the boot line off the CD. I think I forgot to include the hostname= option at the time I started the installation. D'oh!I'll probably redo the installation anyway now that I have a better clue as to what to do. I'll also go back to my bigger disk (a whopping 800MB instead of the 340MB I have currently in use) that I was using earlier. Maybe I can even have some swap space.
Thanks,
Rod
Posted by curaga on May 13 2008,13:59
No need to reinstall, you can change the boot options in a file in /boot (menu.lst for grub, lilo.conf for lilo)