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Topic: Installing DSL on USB HD for transfer to laptop, An interesting way to install DSL

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DavidCo

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 01 2005,03:30

Sorry this is a little long... I just want to go through what I've done so far with this little project and want some advice/opionion from the community. If I get this working I am willing to write a mini guide for the DSL wiki on my method of installing DSL on a laptop with no CDROM drive or Floppy drive.

I recently got my hands on a IBM thinkpad 701CS that sadly lacked a CDROM drive and a floppy drive (the floppy drive isn't hard to get one's hands on... its the connecting cable.) Anyhow I decided to install DSL on this modest laptop (It has 8 megs of ram which I'm upgraded to 40 megs sooner or later) and figured I could install DSL on a a laptop drive thats currently in a USB enclosure and then removing that drive from the enclosure and installing it in the laptop itself. I need to pick up a super small torque wrench to remove the drive currently in the laptop so I won't be able to say if this worked for a day or two....

As for what I've done so far... I got the DSL live cd running in another computer and then I did a hd-install on a laptop drive running as a suplimentrary USB drive [dev/sda]. During the install I made sure that DSL would be installed on the USB drive (sda2 instead of hda2 et al)

After the install I rebooted into DSL and worked on the lilo.conf and fstab files changing all references to sda# to the appropriated hda# counter part....

I'm just curious if I missed anything important that would prevent the smooth transfer and booting of the laptop drive in the caddy to the laptop itself. Any comments would be appreciated and I'll get back to you all with the result when I get that "torque" screwdriver....

Thanks in advance
DeeCo

PS I did read that was said on installing DSL on a laptop drive via a 2.5 drive to 3.5 adapter on a desktop PC. I suppose if this doesn't work I could do that... but I'd rather try doing this way first given that I've already started.

jshaw

Group: Members
Posts: 42
Joined: July 2004

Posted: May 01 2005,08:42

The only problem I see is that when the HD is installed in the laptop LILO will be looking for an operating system at sda1 instead of hda1, where it will be at that point. If that's the case, you'll just have to put the drive back into the usb enclosure and rerun lilo with lilo.conf changed to point LILO to the image at hda1.

josh

--------------
Dell Optiplex GX100 - Painted Flat Black
Celeron 566
256 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 4400MX - Onboard graphics are crap
Old Sound Card
ProView 19" Widescreen 1440x900 native resolution
(thanks XFree86 and nvidia2 extensions)
DSL 4.2.5 ROCKS on this machine!

DavidCo

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 01 2005,20:21

Okay... I'm getting a kernel panic here... something about appending the proper "root=" to my boot option.. as Jshaw said I put the proper heading there. (root=/dev/hda3 i also tried root=/dev/hda (hda1 is a fat file system for my hibernation file) hda2 is swap))

I'm sorta at a loss here... Gonna keep looking into it... any advice?

DavidCo

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 01 2005,23:06

It seems that there is problems with the enhanced HD install...

I caved and bought a 2.5 to 2.5 inch HD adapter... and ran into the same kernel panic error. I then did the ormal install... and things turned out okay (well my desktop rebooted... I'm about to transfer to my laptop now.
I'll post the results..

DeeCo

3 replies since May 01 2005,03:30

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