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Topic: Installing DSL FROM HD Frugal No CDROM, old cheapskates!

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u2musicmike Offline

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Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: Aug. 25 2006,15:13

I am sorry that I'm not much help. If fdisk wouldn't work it almost sounds like your hard disk is messed up and that might be causing the BIOS error. I had a hard drive that I couldn't partition and I wiped it with a Window 98 boot disk and reformated then I booted up with DSL and partitioned as ext2. I haven't had any trouble from the hard drive since then. For that small amount of memory DSL needs swap space so if you have to take drastic measures with your hard drive remember to make a good 50M swap partition. You can do the hard drive install from the command line if you boot dsl 2 and look in usr/sbin for the HDinstall script but you really should try to fix the hard drive first.

dscott23

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Posted: Aug. 27 2006,01:02

I just found myself in a similar situation. I have DSL installed on a USB flash drive, and then it struck me that I might actually be able to get some use out of my old Pentium laptop.

Mine won't boot from CD, and there's no USB support either. What I ended up doing (after some trial and error), was create a 100MB FAT partition (hda1), and this is where I extracted the dsl-3.0.1.iso image to. The rest of the hard drive I formatted as FAT32 (hda2). The only reason the first partition is not FAT32, is because FAT32 has to be at least 256MB (or something like that).

As for formatting, I have a 2.5" USB HDD enclosure that I put the laptop hard drive in, doing the actual formatting through my Ubuntu system.

Put the hard drive back in the laptop, booted up with a floppy (bootfloppy.img), and once everything loaded, I mounted hda2, ran "install to Hard Disk", and directed it to install to hda2. DSL reformatted hda2 as ext2, and everything's working fine. Currently this leaves the 100MB's or so of hda1 unused, but I'm not really concerned. It's an old system, and I'm happy I can get some more life out of it.

Hope this helps. Good luck.
D.

gigi1234

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Posted: Aug. 27 2006,02:02

I have done something similar-created a partition (FAT) to copy the files from the iso to, then use the DSL boot disk to boot from HD. It does work, but with no X since I have low ram.

I am trying to install to the HD now and I am having trouble with GRUB. Something is messed up about my MBR I think but I don't know much about these problems.

The install fails here: tempnam: No such file or directory /sbin/grub-install: line 361: cannot create temp file for here document: Read-only file system.

What gives?

gigi1234

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Posted: Aug. 27 2006,02:03

Oh yeah, you can make that left over 100MB into a swap partition, no?

dscott23

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Posted: Aug. 27 2006,20:05

The "Read only File System" warning might indicate the issue. The permissions for the drive may only allow writing by a certain user (root perhaps). I had issues like this when formatting through my Ubuntu system. If I formatted ext3, I couldn't write to the drive afterwards, but with formatting FAT and FAT32 I didn't have these problems.

I don't know what you've used to format the drive, but maybe you can try a different program. I'm no expert at this myself, but it appears to me the installer is trying to write to the drive but simply isn't allowed to.

And ya, the 100MB's as swap is a good idea.

18 replies since Aug. 23 2006,18:53

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