HD boot partition not recognized

Forum: HD Install
Topic: HD boot partition not recognized
started by: trelane

Posted by trelane on May 16 2005,04:57

I've just done an HD install of DSL by following the suggested reading

here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/64

and here: < http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-hd-install.html >

...

the installation seems to go pretty smooth on standard install but upon reboot the laptop simply asks for a boot disk.

It's obviously not recognizing the boot partition.

I'm using a very off-brand notebook computer simply called "PC Notebook". I've had Fedora 3 installed on it without problems. I've used a partition eraser "slate" to remove all partitions. The DSL boot CD works excellent. My specs are as follows:

400 Mhz Celeron Processor (128k cache)
128 MB RAM
6.4 GB hard drive.
Xircom PCMCIA ethernet adaptor

How can I tell that LILO has been properly installed on the boot partition? If it is then any reason why the laptop doesn't see the bootloader?

Is there anything else I could check or need to know?

T

Posted by trelane on May 17 2005,06:35

Ya know what... forget it. Now I know why folks are so easy to use Windows. I've spent hours trying to find a solution, lost work time and still nothing.

Posted by trelane on May 19 2005,07:20

Okay, time to eat crow. Pardon my previous rant -- frustration can do that to a person. My apologies to John Andrews (I bought Knoppix Hacks BTW).

Ironically it was the installation of Windows that allowed me to install DSL and boot to it. LILO seems to work better with another OS on the drive (I'd be tempted to try this with just a small DOS partition installed).

Basically all I did was use DOS fdisk to wipe the drive (run with /mbr and then deleted all partitions), and create a 990 MB FAT32 partition.

I did an install Windows 98SE to it.

When Windows was done installing I booted to DSL Live CD.

(a quick note here: I used syslinux 1.1, not DSL 1.1 because DSL 1.1 has a scrambled startup screen, nothing major, just ugly).

I opened a terminal and used cfdisk to create hda2 (Linux ext2) and hda3 (Linux swap).

I ran the commands "mkswap /dev/hda3" and "swapon /dev/hda3" to enable the swap partition.

Then I ran the command "dsl-hdinstall" and did a standard install to hda2. After mkliloboot finished I rebooted and was presented with a LILO boot screen, YES! DSL booted fine!

I know have a minimalist Linux install on my 400Mhz laptop.

Hope this helps somebody else.
T