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Topic: Installing to HD and cfdisk errors

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Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: May 11 2008,18:25

I am trying to create DSL dedicated BOINC machine by installing DSL on an older system. I have managed to do this before about a year ago but am having trouble doing this again. I am using the latest DSL v4.2.5. I am mostly a Linux/Unix neophyte so keep that in mind. Also note that I am only going to install DSL on this disk, so I don't need to have different partitions for DOS/WIN or whatever.

So I have tried using a standard disk install and a frugal install but there is some disconnect with the disk itself. After reading a lot of posts in this forum that are related to my problems, I think my biggest problem is that the disk isn't partitioned correctly. I initially created a DOS partition with fdisk on the disk to install to. However, that installation failed. I am not sure why this failed since all appeared to finish normally but the system wouldn't boot.

So I tried many other install types like the frugal install and it fails because it says there is no disk to install to.

So then reading here, I thought I would try to partition the disk with cfdisk. When I start cfdisk, it immediately comes up with an error that says "Fatal Error: cannot open disk drive". I even tried "cfdisk -z /dev/hda" as suggested by others.

So at this point I need some help to figure out what is happening. If I can't get the partition right, I think that I will not be able to do the install.

Thanks in advance for your help

Rod

curaga

Group: Members
Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: May 11 2008,18:59

Seems your disk drive is not the ide master in the first channel (hda), nothing too harmful.
Use "dmesg | grep hd" in a terminal to find out which device it is, you should see something like this:

Quote

hda: HITACHI_DK23CA-20, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 39070080 sectors (20003 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63<6>hda: hw_config=600b
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4

This is the output on my current laptop, saying my disk is hda and has four partitions.

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There's no such thing as life. Those mean little jocks invented it ;)
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Windows is not a virus. A virus does something!

Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: May 11 2008,19:26

Thanks for the reply.

I tried your suggestion to check for what drives are used but the command "dmesg |grep hd" returns nothing. It is as if the drives are not there. If I boot DOS, I can fdisk this drive and format it and it will boot DOS.

I am pretty sure that my drive is configured for the master drive on the IDE. However, I did check the drive and my mother board was not recognizing the correct number of sectors/cylinders etc. I modified these to be correct and tried again but with the same result.

Other thoughts? Thanks again.
Rod

curaga

Group: Members
Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: May 12 2008,14:06

Okay, then read the output of dmesg through and see if there are any clues to why your drive isn't recognized. It's also available in "System stats" in the Control Panel, with a scroll bar

--------------
There's no such thing as life. Those mean little jocks invented it ;)
-
Windows is not a virus. A virus does something!

Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: May 12 2008,17:00

I think I solved my problem. First problem I think was that one needs to be root to run cdfdisk, but one isn't told it is a permissions problem, cfdisk just gives an error. Once I figured that out, I was able to see the disk and partition it.

Once that was done, the install proceeded normally.

Now I am trying to figure out how to change the hostname, which the Wiki helped me on but I forgot to update the KNOPPIX config thing. I'll get to that tonight. Also, I am trying to get real VNC server to work on boot up (like the Winodws variant) but I get no options to run it as a service or daemon or whatever DSL calls it.

Thanks for your help.
Rod

7 replies since May 11 2008,18:25

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