I get by with a LILO help of my frieeeeends...

Forum: HD Install
Topic: I get by with a LILO help of my frieeeeends...
started by: davide

Posted by davide on Jan. 24 2005,13:27

hi folks

well, I bought an old laptop (compaq armada 4110, pentium 100Mhz, 40Mb) on purpose to install dsl.
Of course no cd, so no cd-boot.
I took the Hd off, plugged it into a desktop, resized win95 partition with QtParted, from a knoppix livecd, and created a swap partition and a 350mb partition for full install of dsl, that I did immediately after.
Everything seemed to work well, I installed lilo too, but when I put the HD back to the laptop, I get two kind of bugs.

1) you passed an undentified mode number...(always the same..). I've searched the archive and almost fixed it ( I type one of the option. I'd rather put vga=788 or other boot option, but it just doesn't get till the prompt)

2) after this step, I get kernel panic, because it can't find a kernel to load. it searches all partitions...but no luck.
So I immagine that I must reconfigure lilo.conf. but how?
win 95 can't see linux partitions..so I would need a working linux environment to configure it ..but I have no cd..what floppy should I use to do this? any suggest?

thanx!

Posted by Bidi on Jan. 24 2005,17:51

When you ran the HD install and then LILO, did you have that HD as your primary drive on the installion computer? I had a similar booting problem when I made my main primary HD into a slave HD, LILO wouldn't even run. Make sure that when you install everything to HD you have that HD set as the primary drive on the computer.

If that's not your problem you can also get one of the many Linux Emergency disks (my favorite is < tomsrtbt >).

Posted by davide on Jan. 24 2005,20:55

hummm
I don't really know. probably it was a slave hd, since I added it to the existent Hd. but I'm sure the partition I installed Dsl to it was created as primary active partition...does this make sense?

thanks for the hints, anyway..I'll check

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 25 2005,06:12

If I were you, I would just wipe the hard drive and start over. It doesn't take that long to do a re-install.

Just make sure that the hard drive is connected up as the Primary master when your swap it over to your other computer.

"Primary Active Partition" just means that you have installed DSL to one of the original primary partitions (partition #1 , #2, #3 or #4) instead of an extended partition. Active is nice for booting, but if your boot loader is looking in the wrong place (IE: your Primary Slave hard drive), then your bootup will fail.

Posted by davide on Feb. 25 2005,15:35

Hi folks,
now I've got it running frugal install. But I didn't realize I could not overwrite files...it's read and write only. so now lilo just don't start and I can't get to my win 95 partition: It just bootd into dsl....humm...I'd like to edit /etc/lilo.conf but I don't know if I can make the partition writable. Also..if so..can I use it as a normal partition, say for storing files and preferences??
I'll probably have to re-install again, this time as a full install. I don't know if my compaq armada 4110 P100 ram 40Mg will go faster or slower..now it runs pretty fast. Amazing, considering it's running from ram, if I get it right.

Posted by clivesay on Feb. 25 2005,15:51

davide -

first, I highly recommend staying with frugal. It is the best way to run from the hard drive.

You may want to consider looking at SaidinUnleashed grub howto. I am booting a poormans of DSL with Grub. It is pretty easy to configure.

BTW you have one of the best thread titles I have seen. I crack up whenever I see it.

Chris