Poorman's install problem

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Poorman's install problem
started by: Kerwin

Posted by Kerwin on Nov. 11 2005,10:48

Hello all,

I think DSL is great but I have some problems installing it. Any help would be gladly appreciated. Here we go :

The machine is a P1 90MHz with 70 something RAM. There's a IDE HD and a CDROM drive on the same controller. HD in master.

I burned dsl-2.0RC1-syslinux.iso on a CD and made a boot floppy. Floppy works but doesn't find the burned CD. I made some tests using win98 boot floppy, it seems the CD drive doesn't read my burned CD.

So I grabbed a network bootdisk and copied KNOPPIX to c:KNOPPIX and re-tried to boot using the floppy disk.

No success, it goes :
Loading linux24.........................
Loading minirt24.gz.....
Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

I'm kind of running out of ideas... HELP

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 11 2005,15:59

What filesystem is C ? It probably won't work if it's ntfs

The ideal situation for poorman/frugal is to create a partition with ext2 filesystem (and a swap partition if you have the space).

Posted by Kerwin on Nov. 11 2005,17:03

Thanks for your reply.

I formatted C: using a windows 98 bootdisk. I would guess it's FAT32 then. Don't know how to check that.

How do I create a ext2 filesystem ?

Posted by captainpotato on Nov. 13 2005,12:19

Quote (Kerwin @ Nov. 11 2005,22:03)

How do I create a ext2 filesystem ?

Load cfdisk and use it to create an ext2 partition. You need a type 82 partition (from memory - Linux, in any case), and then:

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda*

Where * is the partition number that you want to format as ext2.

Posted by Kerwin on Nov. 13 2005,12:31

Ok, I was using the wrong bootdisk. It now works, finding KNOPPIX on my FAT HD and loading DSL. Seems to work pretty well.

I'm having troubles doing a frugal install. I know I have to make my HD ready before I can use the tool in the system menu of DSL. However when I go terminal and try cfdisk, it says hda is not mounted or something. When I try to mount it, it fails saying the thing is not ready. Any suggestion ?

Posted by AwPhuch on Nov. 17 2005,23:31

You have to copy all the directories....the KNOPPIX and the boot directory...otherwise it wont know where to find the kernel or image

Look closer at the CD, there are 3 directories I believe...the lost&found I dont think you need

Brian
AwPhuch