wafer
Group: Members
Posts: 11
Joined: Jan. 2007 |
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Posted: Jan. 07 2007,01:30 |
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Ok, so I've scoured this forum for help with getting DSL installed on my system HDD...which is:
Sony laptop (PCG-N505VE) with a USB floppy drive and PCMCIA CD Drive (PCGA-CD51), 6G HDD, 64M RAM, Celeron 366M.
My situation is fairly unique, DSL floppy and CD boots do not work on my laptop unless I have KNOPPIX on my C: drive (which is another problem altogether - I don't want win98 on my system at all). The problem with both of these boot methods (I believe) is that the USB and PCMCIA drives/interfaces get initialized by DSL during boot and stop functioning as a regular IDE cd-rom drive or regular floppy drive (like they were behaving at the beginning of the boot sequence). Interestingly, the Xubuntu Alternate Install CD boots just fine - I was able to install it, but it's a slug on this machine. If there's an easy fix for this boot issue (modifying some files on the DSL-Live CD), I'd love to know what that might be. Anyway, as it is, I have to have win98 installed on C: (hda1).
First, I want to know if my installation procedure is correct:
Partition drives (as in HDD Install wiki) hda2 is 256M linux swap - type 82, hda3 is remaining (approx 5G) linux -type 83 - it shows as Linux ext2 (I have not set a boot flag in either of these partitions). hda1 is my Win95 FAT32 partition for Win98 - Boot flag is set for this partition.
Continued with instructions in HDD Install wiki to end (including the HD install FAQ referenced there).
Next I installed GRUB according to the GRUB install wiki.
When I boot my system, GRUB starts, but when I try to boot into DSL, I get this message:
Booting 'DSL'
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda3 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal
Error 15: File not found
Press any key to continue
Windows boots fine, but not DSL.
Any ideas on what I am doing wrong here? Special issues a noob might overlook when following the install procedures because his target system has "special needs"? Are there any special things I need to do while making the partitions - i.e. formatting, boot flags, etc? Have I done things out of order? Am I supposed to install GRUB first? Am I supposed to abort the LILO portion of the HDD install procedure if I'm going to use GRUB? I noticed the frugal switch above, is that supposed to be there, or not, or does it matter? I also noticed on one of the wiki's that the /boot tree should be copied to the HDD along with KNOPPIX. It wasn't there when I did the DSL and GRUB installs. Would this help out at all? Something to do with frugal? I didn't think I was doing a frugal install when I followed the hdd install guide (isn't frugal install a different installation method?)
I'm competely new to Linux and wanted to use this system to start learning.
Also, I don't really want win98 on this machine. If anyone has any ideas short of tearing apart the computer that might work for me, I'd appreciate it. I've tried making a DOS boot floppy so I could create a very small dos partition on the HDD for KNOPPIX that I could eventually merge into the swap partition, but couldn't get the PCMCIA CD-ROM to work from the DOS boot disk - I put all of the driver files for that drive I could find on the DOS boot disk (only the .sys files - might need other files?), though I'm not certain I did everything right with the config.sys file (might need to change something else?). I could include the boot disk file list and contents of config.sys file here if anyone is interested in helping out on that end.
Thanks a ton for any help.
Wafer
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