FINALLY!Forum: HD Install Topic: FINALLY! started by: Comet Posted by Comet on July 02 2005,17:42
so I was looking for a good linux distribution to install on my Toshiba 425CDS p100 with 16megs of RAM and a 800mb harddrive..Damn Small Linux was the solution indeed.. I've been reading on quite a few of people's issues with old laptops, and I want to share the steps I took in copying the entire DSL distro to my harddrive, and booting it without a problem.. now most of you I'm sure have experienced Kernel paging errors due to not enough swap space.. you've edited the sysconfig file many times to include things like "mem=16M vga=normal ramdisk=2304" and so forth.. after waiting approximately 30 minutes for X windows to fully load, I was finally able to EXIT X windows which then brought mr to my command prompt.. once I was there, I simply typed in "sudo su" and it gave me root access.. from there, I proceeded to follow all the directions for copying DSL to my harddrive.. I ran "cfdisk" and erased all my old Windows partitions.. created a 600mb primary ext2 linux partition, and a 200mb swap partition.. saved all my changes, and "wrote" all my partition information to disk.. after they were created and I exited cfdisk, I ran the program "dsl-hdinstall".. it took me through the process of copying all the DSL files to my harddrive.. After it was finished, it took me through the "mkliloboot" process.. this is all fine and dandy, except if you have to pass special kernel options, the default lilo.conf WILL NOT BOOT YOUR OLD TOSHIBA SATELITE or any other old laptop with 16 megs of ram.. therefore, after running mkliloboot, i went to /mnt/hd/etc and edited the "lilo.conf" file using the vi editor.. all the way at the bottom of the lilo.conf file, you'll see the "append" kernel options.. I added mem=16M and vga=normal and ramdisk=2304 then saved my lilo.conf.. the next thing to do was write the lilo information to the master boot record simply by typing "lilo" as root.. this WILL NOT WORK because by default it attempts to write and use information from the ramdisk which does not have write access.. i simply did a rm -rf /boot which temporarily deleted the ramdisk's /boot directory.. then I created a symlink using: "ln -s /mnt/hd/boot /boot" after the symlink was created, I typed "lilo -C /mnt/hd/etc/lilo.conf" and it successfully created the apropriate Lilo master boot record, with my specific and MUCH NEEDED kernel appendages.. if any of you are having problems copying the install to disk and you're using an old laptop, let me know.. |