mount: /ramdisks not found in /etc/fstab or /etc/m

Forum: Laptops
Topic: mount: /ramdisks not found in /etc/fstab or /etc/m
started by: KerowynM

Posted by KerowynM on June 04 2006,20:52

Hi all.

I'm trying to do a poormans frugal install on a Dell Latitude LM laptop. The floppy and cd drive share a slot so I copied the CD to hda1 (The pre-existing Win95 partition, shrunk down to allow me to make a swap, a 75 meg dsl partion, and 400mb for data) and booted with a boot floppy. Durring the boot things go well, untill I get the error (And pardon if its not quoted right, I'm not in front of it)

mount: /ramdisk not found in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

and the system goes about its way. then if I try to install a .dsl it keeps telling me I don't have any space on the ramdisk. I can't seem to find anything relevent while searching the forums so I've got my hands in the air.

Posted by kerry on June 05 2006,08:36

What DSL version are you trying to install? Is there a reason why you don't just boot up the cd and use the frugal install? Have you tried copying it again? I've had that no space thing on DSL-N but never on DSL from a fresh boot.

Posted by KerowynM on June 05 2006,13:57

Sorry, I should have been more specific. The laptop is too old to boot from the CD, P1 133Mhz 16M. I've tried both DSL 2.3 and 2.4, with the same results. dsl-n won't boot on my desktop (AthlonXP 2000+ 640M yadda..) for whatever reason (I never got around to doing more then burning, booting, failing, and moving on) I'm pretty sure it won't work on the ancient laptop

I actually finnaly managed a HD install with lilo (Grub didn't want to take for some reason, which is unfortunate because I don't remember anything about lilo) and now am trying to get XF86 to work with the laptop display (I finnally got kdrive working with the fbdev and vga=785), but that is another story...

I still want to be using a frugal install, but whenever I boot one, or boot from the poormans, I get no ramdisk, just a ro root filesystem. Oh well at least I got one type of install to work. Might just have to wait for 3.0 to get more stable and hope unionfs works better.

Posted by KerowynM on June 07 2006,22:43

Well I'm still plugging away with no success. No matter what I do it still spits that error out.

Would it be possible to just add an appropriate line to the fstab? of course I cant edit it its ro, but I may be able to do it on my hd install and stick it in an otherwise empty backup.tar.gz, copy it to hda1 and try to restore it back that way? That may work if the ramdisks gets loaded after the restore, but I'm not in front of it at the moment so I can't check. Any clue what the missing line should look like? Its strange because my desktop boots of the CD's with no problems at all.

The other option would be to set up the ramdisk after the system boots? not pretty but it might work. Unfortuneately I have no idea how to do that

Thanks in advance. It's such a strange error. Really irritateing too as DSL is pretty much that laptops only hope for usefullness, and HD installs are clunky.

Posted by cbagger01 on June 11 2006,03:25

With only 16MB of RAM, you are almost obligated to do a traditional hard disk install.

16MB is barely enough to get the OS + X Windows system up and running, so adding *.dsl extensions to a livecd/poorman or frugal install is out of the question. With some swap space, you might be able to get away with using some *.tar.gz or *.uci extensions but your best bet is to perform a traditional hard disk installation, unless you can upgrade your RAM.

A traditional hd install will easily fit inside a 400MB partition with space left over. If you don't like it, simply delete the partition and use it for something else.

Posted by KerowynM on June 12 2006,14:16

Hmm, I see. I wonder if thats what is causing the issue in the first place. I'm starting to wonder if this particular laptop is worth the effort at the moment as well, I tried 2 different PCMCIA network cards in it can can't get either one to even make the LCD readout on the laptop blink on. It had a 33.6 modem in it that seems to respond, but doesn't appear to have linux support. I no longer have a dialup ISP anyway so it's not doing me any good anyway. No USB ports and I tried a PCMCIA board with some and nothing as well. It's become more of a toy then anything. Still the bug was kinda driving me mad. I was really hoping to get it to a point where I could bang out code on it sitting at the starbucks down the street but DSL doesn't seem suited for the task either, I'm relearning everything and dealing with libraries is driving me nuts =P