HDD install on laptop that won't boot CDForum: Laptops Topic: HDD install on laptop that won't boot CD started by: tonymoloney Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 13 2005,05:36
Thanks to the help from this forum, I've been able to get my old lappie to boot from a floppy.Now, I'd like to do a frugal install to the hard disk. However, before I start, I have one question. Does/will a frugal install copy files from the Windows C: wher I copied them for the floppy boot, or does it try to copy from the CD? My problem is that I have one of those lappies that share the floppy drive with the CD drive so that I can only have one or the other - so if I boot rom a floppy, I can't have the CD and vice/versa. I don't want to start partitioning my disk then find out that I can't go any further. Tony Posted by sarah on Dec. 13 2005,10:07
If you can run DSL from one parttition, even if it is running a frugal install from a Windows partition, you should be able to install into the other partition. The installation script formats the destination partition, which is why you need to have twopartitions if you do it that way. Backup anything you want to keep first though. Cheers and beers, Sarah PS Don't know how much help I'll be, but I'll be around on and off tonight (our time) until about 9.30 or so if you get stuck. Posted by sarah on Dec. 13 2005,10:16
Also, you might find your chances of success increase if you run the script from runlevel 2 (the text only console).The installation you have on your machine running from a Windows partitiona should be auto-mounted (Read only) to /cdrom so really there should be no difference whether you do the installation from a CD or a poorman's install. The installation script will pick up any options you use in the boot sequence and copy them over to the install, so be sure to use all the boot options you normally would (Pea brain here left out the vga=normal and booted to text mode, so didn't pick up the error prior to doing the installation, and then wondered why it would boot from floppy when I typed in the options manually, but not from my brand spanking new installation!) (And if I have steered you wrong, I am really really hoping someone comes along to enlighten you before I've lead you down the path towards system breakage!) Good luck! Cheers and beers Sarah Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 13 2005,22:50
Hi sarahThanks for that. I'll give it a go today (Wednesday over here in the West). I've got nothing to lose as far as the Windows installation is concerned but I'll try the two partitions first. Tony 7:30am WA time Posted by sarah on Dec. 14 2005,12:42
Hey Tony,Just thought I'd see how you're doing? I meant to ask if you have read the frugal install how-to pdf? It's a bit late, but better late than never maybe? < http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/pdfdocs/ > will take you there :o) Cheers and beers, Sarah PS Time zones can be off-set in the profile section (I think we're +13 from memory) so it shows the posts in local time. Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 15 2005,00:47
Hi SarahThanks for the tips, especially the howto .pdf. Due to a couple of emergencies and Christmas shopping, I didn't really have much of a chance to play yesterday. However, I should get more time today. I'll let you know how I go. Tony Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 15 2005,08:17
Well!!!!!! There's never a dull moment when you're playing with computers!By following the tips and reading between the lines and in between visits to the hospital, I have finally got DSL installed to my hard drive. However - Now it boots from the hard drive without giving any choice, even if the partition is not selected as bootable. Because I needed to access the Winows partition to be able to install - due to the fact that the floppy and the CD share the same port - I decided to install to the unused space on the Windows C: drive. When I ran cfdisk to set up the partition and make it bootable, cfdisk reported that the MBR could not handle dual booting. "Not a problem" I thought "That is just a toggle so I can try it with or without dual booting" Now, regardless of which option is picked, DSL (or LILO) always boots without giving me an option to pick it or Windows. cfdisk shows that the Windows partiton still exists and is boot able so I can't think what is happening here. BTW I initially created my space for DSL by using Windows fdisk, toasting the hard disk and re-installing Windows etc. to a smaller partition. Any clues? Tony Posted by sarah on Dec. 15 2005,11:20
I am wondering which DSL Lilo is booting? Is it booting the frugal image in your Windows partition, or is it booting the installation you want to run DSL from? Anyway, I was thinking the solution would be to go into DSL, open a terminal and become root. BACK UP the /etc/lilo.conf file and then edit your /etc/lilo.conf file. I can only make a guess based on my lilo.conf file -sorry. :o( Add the following lines:
And run lilo before you reboot.. lilo -C /etc/lilo.conf (I think Lilo is located in /sbin/lilo). And I'll be honest, I am pretty much guessing, so you might want to get someone else to confirm it before you try it unless you don't mind possibly breaking things.. I hope everything is ok with you and yours - emergencies doesn't sound too promising! Good luck. Cheers and beers Sarah Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 15 2005,22:43
grub to me is the better bootload..plus when you install it, it asks you if your windows is on /dev/hda1..then kapow!!!Brian AwPhuch Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 15 2005,23:25
Sarah, BrianThanks for the replies. I have a feeling that LILO is booting the DSL from my Windows partition as the installation just didn't seem to take long enough to copy the files from /dev/hda1 to /dev/hda2. When I get a chance I'll follow your tips - might be a couple of days, though. Brian, how do I get grub in when I've already got LILO? Tony Posted by sarah on Dec. 16 2005,05:53
Tony: you're welcome. :o) Hope things have settled for you at home.In the last day or two I've done a bit of reading and as Brian said, GRUB is way better for dual booting with Windows, but I haven't played with it. I just went with whatever I picked since I didn't really know what the benefits of GRUB vs LiLo were and I wasn't dual booting on the laptop. It might be useful to watch this other thread regarding the same problem in case an answer gets posted there: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=10161 > Although larkl says that apparently lilo.conf can't be edited in a frugal install? Since you've only just installed to the other partition, I was wondering whether you could either run the installation script again since it's using the DSL image from your windows partition? Failing that use the DSL boot floppy to boot the Windows frugal DSL image (using your boot switches to select fromhd=/dev/hda1 (assuming your windows partition is the first one on your primary drive)) and re-install selecting GRUB as the boot loader might work? Brian can probably give you a better way, but I wondered if doing it as above would work? Cheers and beers! Sarah Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 17 2005,05:37
Yeah!! Success!! - well sort of.My daughter's still in hospital but I've managed to get some time to work on this. First of all, I decided to boot from the Windows floppy and run fdisk /mbr to re-instate the system as it was, Then I booted DSL from the floppy and followed the instruction to do a Grub install. Great! it all worked and now I have an old laptop that will boot and run either Windows or Linux. Then I decide to take out the floppy drive and put in the CD drive. What did Alice say when she went thriugh the looking glass? "Curioser and curioser" I think. Well now I am in Wonderland too and things are getting curioser and curioser. When I try to boot the system with the CD drive in place, GRUB starts up and gives me the same choices it did previouslly i.e. with the floppy drive in place but no disk in the drive. However, now it just crashes after entering the required mode. I get the following messages (some of them in brief): OK, bootingthe kernel Oops: 0000 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010[<00000000>] Not tainted Eflags: .... eax: ..... esi: ..... ds: ...... Process swapper ......... Stack ....... Call Trace ...... Code: bad EIP value <0> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init ! I've looked at the GRUB command and it says kernel /boot/linux24 root= /dev/hda2 quiet vga=788 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal which is exactly the same when I boot with the floppy drive connected. And just to confuse the issue, Windows boots OK. No wonder "Alice in Wonderland" used to be required reading for first time programmers way back in th '60s when I first got into computers. If anyone wants to contribute to this thread you can be assured you are most welcome! Tony P.S I'm off to the hospital again soon so may not see your response for a while. Tony Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 20 2005,06:04
Well! Some ( doubtful) progress.First of all, my daughter is out of hospital, so while she is recuperating (and monopolising my desktop) I've spent many hours on the CD problem. First thing I discovered, after a lot of searching, was that the Frugal install had NOT installed to the /dev/hda2 partition as I thought but was running from the Windows C: CD copy that I had put there. So I went ahead and did a full hard disk install. This went to /dev/hda2 like it was supposed to. I know 'cos it asked me and then took ten minutes to copy all the files over. It then asked me if I wanted to use grub or lilo to which I reponded grub. However, I notice that this grub does not give me the choice of booting Windows, even though it asked if Windows existed on my primary partition. Strange! Anyway, having now got DSL installed on the hard drive, I went ahead and swapped over my CD and floppy to see if I could now see the CD. But - booting crashed with exactly the same message I detailed in the previous post. So now I tried to boot some other live distributions from the CD, namely Puppy, Mepis, Ubuntu and Vector Linux. As almost expected, they all hung except the Vector Linux, which booted up happily and immediately started to install itself. So now I have DSL, Puppy, Mepis and Ubuntu live distributions which just can't be seen by my system PLUS Windows 98SE and Vector Linux which can. I can happily run DSL with the floppy disk attached, but as I want to use the CD to transfer files larger than 1.44Mb, I not sure where to go from here. Happy Christmas all Tony Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 20 2005,07:01
I have an old Compaq LTE 5300, I had a huge problem with the CDROM because it was defective and would crash DSL on boot...it started as a long boot delay..then slowly turned into a complete kernel crash...It might be your CDROM had finally gone the way of the dodo! Brian AwPhuch Posted by tonymoloney on Dec. 20 2005,22:45
Hi BrianYou could be right, but for the fact that it will boot both the Windows and the Vector disks. In fact, I have re-installed Windows 3 times already and I've booted the Vector disk twice in the last hour. Tony Posted by sarah on Dec. 28 2005,04:00
Tony: I suspect DSL 2.0 boots by default from the image on /dev/hda1(because that is the first one it finds) unless you tell it otherwise - I had problems running on the other (not quite so cruddy) laptop if I didn't specify fromhd=/dev/hda2In the meantime, if you're still persisting with this, you can also rename the knoppix file on your windows partition and see if it will then boot from your real partition? I'd still stick with the frugal install. I don't know about the CD problems, the only thing I can think is that perhaps there's a problem with your CD burner? Cheers and beers! Sarah PS Glad to hear your girl is well enough to be stealing your machine! |