HD Install - Can't access drive???


Forum: HD Install
Topic: HD Install - Can't access drive???
started by: bryandj23

Posted by bryandj23 on July 09 2005,02:45
Hi All...

I'm a linux newbie.  I'm an IT Director for a large insurance firm and am very familiar with Windows and Windows Networking (studying MCSE, in fact).

Anyways, I'd like to start dipping into linux a bit.   So far DSL runs on every machine I've installed it on (I've used it very little until now) - including this 486 DX2, 40 Meg Ram, and 1.2 Gig Hard Drive.

I've pulled a CD-ROM from another machine for install purposes, but I'd really rather have it on hda1 for faster bootup and since Compaq (in their wonder wizdom) made these damned deskpro's with special rails needed to mount drives correctly.  

Anyways, I've used cfdisk to create a bootable partition - that works fine.

Do the dsl-hdinstall and choose extended install.  I choose the ext2 file system and it gets created.  (A report of some sort (goes by too fast)) looks as if it verifies the file system).  Then it begins to copy from cd (gives the message 2 to 10 minutes...takes about 6!)...after this, the problems begin...

It looks like it's trying to uncompress files, but gives the error, "No such file or directory".  It's almost as if it can't access the hard drive.  I've tried sudo dsl-hdinstall and just dslhdinstall logged in as root.

Towards the end of all the scrolling, it does make mention of "Not enough space on device"....so maybe a whopping 1.2 Gig isn't enough?

Any help you could lend would be greatly appreciated.

-Bryan-

Posted by cbagger01 on July 09 2005,03:06
DSL hd install will easily fit on a 1.2gig drive.

A 250-300MB size partition is a good minimum.

The cfdisk program is similar to the old MSDOS fdisk program.  It allows you to define new partitions and set the bootable flag.

However, like FDISK it does not do the formatting of the new partition.

So while in MSDOS you would format with something like FORMAT /S C:

in linux, you would create a "Linux" (type 83) partition type in cfdisk and also an additional swap partition (type 82) for virtual memory.
So it looks something like this:
hda1  Boot    Linux (type 83)                1000MB
hda2            Linux Swap (type 82)         200MB

Then you format your linux partition with a command like this:

sudo mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda1

and format your swap partition:

sudo mkswap /dev/hda2


Then reboot and do your hd-install.

Posted by bryandj23 on July 10 2005,01:00
Cbagger -  

Thank you so much!!!   I've now got it installed and running on the HD no problem.

-=Bryan=-

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