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Topic: Hard disk hangs on installation attempts

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sataylor

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: Dec. 2006

Posted: Dec. 29 2006,03:22

Hi, I've just found out about DSL and am very interested. It runs fine from the CD on my Pentium II 400MHz machine. The problem I have is that when I try to use cfdisk to partition the drive, after creating the partitions and selecting write, the screen locks up and the HD access light comes on and stays on. I have to turn off the power to recover. If I try to run the "install" option on boot-up, it hangs after it says that it is reading the partition info and creating fstab. I can partition the drive with qtparted but then cfdisk says that the partition table is invalid. I tried installing DSL after partitioning with qtparted and I get the same hang. I have successfully installed freespire on this hard drive and I have checked it with spinrite so I know the drive is OK. I just can't get DSL to install. Freespire is painfully slow on this computer and I really want to get DSL running on it. Anybody have any ideas on what I need to do?

sataylor

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: Dec. 2006

Posted: Dec. 29 2006,18:02

Adding to the above post: I was able to boot a Gentoo CD and used fdisk to partition the HD. Then I tried DSL again and booted with the install option. this time it got to the installation menu but when I tried to install with selection 3, it gets to the point where it says it is creating the file system and hangs, never to come back. I'll do some more experimenting. . .

sataylor

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: Dec. 2006

Posted: Dec. 30 2006,04:19

OK, after more tests I decided that the problem must be the IDE controller on my system. I took the HD to another computer and was able to install DSL just fine. It booted on that computer and ran fine. Then I brought the HD back to my target system and tried booting. It had a kernel panic with something about not being able to mount the file system. My controller is the SIS 5513 on the motherboard, so I am thinking that this chip set is not supported in DSL. Can anybody confirm this? Is there any possibility that there is a workaround?

sataylor

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: Dec. 2006

Posted: Dec. 31 2006,03:53

My son, who is familiar with Gentoo, and I tried rebuilding the 2.4.34 kernel from www.kernel.org with SIS 5513 support and put it on the HD and made a GRUB entry for it. Then when we booted it, we got into the system and but it finally quit while complaining that the file system was not a valid ext2 system when I had specifically told it to make an ext3 system when I installed it. I don't know what's going on here and I am about to give up. I looked at the .config file for DSL 2.1 in the archives and it looked like SIS 8513 support should already be enabled. It just doesn't want to work on this motherboard.