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Topic: HD Install refuses to go through (details)

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CptAJ

Group: Members
Posts: 4
Joined: July 2006

Posted: July 02 2006,17:08

Alright, so I've recently gone on a bit of a Linux craze. I succesfully installed ubuntu and have been enjoying it for a while. However, I remembered about an old compaq presario of mine, 200mhz intel with 16mb of ram. I figured I could bring it out of retirement with a nice compact distro like DSL.

Well, after much trouble and strife I managed to get the thing working. I get to the installer... and thats where things get messy. First of all, the default installation settings (just clicking enter) give me an error and offer me the chance to select display modes or something. But I dont really want a GUI for this machine so I went to the F3 menu in the installation and told it to "install" which would get me a CLI system, right?

After that I clicked on the third option, installing DSL to the harddrive. I had previously partitioned it with an ext2 filesystem and a swap partition, theres nothing else on the harddrive (no windows or anything). It asks me where to install it and I say "hda5", which is where the partition is (pretty sure). Thats when it fails miserably. It doesnt even let me read whatever error message it decided to pop, it just boots me back to the previous menu (where I had chosen the third option).

I also tried installing the 4th option, grub and whatnot. It seemed to be working, it got to format the drive and everything, but then it errored me out because it couldnt run grub for some reason. I went back and chose the 5th option, lilo. Told it to use the live cd like before and it worked. Fantastic. I take out my cd and boot into the hard drive.

Then, after much loading, it gives me the following error code:

Quote

xauth: Creating new authority file /home/dsl/.Xauthority

giving up
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

Then I'm left with the dsl user prompt and no access to root or anything. I dont even know if the OS was properly installed.

Whenever I try to do a normal install it also ends up on the same error. Something is obviously wrong here. I realize its probably a hard thing to help me out with so heres what we can do:

Why dont you guide me through the installation process? Remember, I just want a low resource CLI linux to run on my 16mb ram machine. Ultimately the idea is to be able to access it from my main rig. How should I go about doing that? From the start... I'll post any snags I run into. Alternatively, if you have a solution to the previous problem I'm game.

I really hope you guys can help me out here...

brianw

Group: Members
Posts: 245
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: July 05 2006,01:26

To boot into a text mode only use dsl 2 to boot without gui. If you installed without multi user then dsl will be logged in automatically. When you boot to install I am assuming you are booting from the livecd you should boot dsl 2 install and that will bring up text mode installation. You should be able to install grub or lilo. It sounds like your lilo install worked but when you started it was trying to start the X server but couldn't. You ended up at the user dsl prompt because dsl was automatically logged in. While logged in as dsl you can gain access to root by doing sudo <any command you want> for one time root commands or sudo su to become the root user. if you are at the dsl prompt you can gain root access and set things up to start the way you want and don't worry about the logins from then on. I am not sure what you would want to access on the slower machine unless you are setting up a mail or http server. Normally it is the other way around and you set up a fast server to access from a slower machine.

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: July 06 2006,04:29

You probably don't have enough RAM for a normal bootup. You can boot up minimally and then manually create a swap partition and then reboot and you will have more "virtual" memory available for use. See these posts for more info:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....l=nomce

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....2;st=10

kerry

Group: Members
Posts: 706
Joined: April 2006

Posted: July 06 2006,06:44

if you have nothing on the drive but swap and ext2 there's not going to be a hda5. i've got a feeling your partions are screwed up. if you can grab a copy of the gparted live cd to set up your partions.-> http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

brianw

Group: Members
Posts: 245
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: July 06 2006,23:49

Here is something you can check. Boot with the live cd (or if you can start from HD then that would be OK as well) and run "sudo fdisk -l" to list the partitions. hda1 should be the primary partition, hda2 should be the extended partition and hda5 should be the logical partition. See what the sizes are and make sure they are set to 82 for swap and 83 for Linux.

Here is mine:

brian@armada:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 5403 MB, 5403525120 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 698 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 130 982768+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 131 698 4294080 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 131 148 136079+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 149 278 982799+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 279 698 3175199+ 83 Linux

I have my root filesystem on hda6 and home on hda7 (so when I reinstall or upgrade my data is preserved). As for the X startup once it is installed on the hard drive if you use jwm you will use about 10M of ram with icons and torsmo. So X should be possible but you won't get much else running with X. I did see something about a screens.dsl. I am not very familiar with it but my interpretation is that it offers some rudimentary windowing in a cli environment.

4 replies since July 02 2006,17:08

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Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » HD Install » HD Install refuses to go through (details)