From: corey@sdf.lonestar.org (Corey Carroll) Subject: Problems with hlu rootdisk 0.98pl5, fdisk, # of cylinders, core dumps, out of memory errors Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 17:31:35 GMT
Dear comp.os.linuxers,
I have a spare 386sx system here at work that I am trying to install
Linux on. I have a 386sx-25, Compudyne motherboard, and a Conner
CP3204F hard drive. I have hlu's boot/rootdisk that has Linux 0.98pl5
on it, along with lilo.
I can load up from floppy just fine; I get 4 virtual consoles, it
recognizes my serial ports, my printer, and my hard drive. It prints
"linux 0.98.pl5-31 11/25/92 hlu@nighthawk", and I can login as root,
and run programs from the floppy just fine.
The first problem I encountered was when running fdisk off the
floppy. My hard drive has 1366 cylinders, 8 heads, and 38 sectors
per track. When fdisk starts up, it prints something like, "WARNING:
the number of cylinders is 1366. This is greater than 1024. Some
software may have problems with this." The next thing I do is,
after having partitioned ~100Megs for DOS (It is a 214Meg hard drive),
I partition the rest as follows:
/dev/hda1 DOS ~ 100 Megs
/dev/hda2 Linux root system ~ 40 Megs
/dev/hda3 Extended partition
/dev/hda4 Swap partition ~ 8 Megs
/dev/hda5 Extended file system ~ 55 Megs
I then follow the instructions hlu gave with his rootdisk; I do a
mkfs /dev/hda2 40000
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt
(cd /; cp -av . /mnt)
It makes the filesystem, mounts it (apparently?), and starts copying the
files on the rootdisk. I don't know if it is actually copying them to
hard disk or not, though; my hard disk LED is not connected, and I can't
tell if the hard drive is being accessed over the noise of my power supply.
I then edit the /mnt/etc/fstab file to make /dev/hda2 root. Then I follow
the rest of the instructions, installing lilo to boot Linux by doing
the following:
cd /mnt/etc/lilo
rm map boot.????
./lilo -r /mnt -b /dev/hda2 -i /etc/lilo/boot.b -v -v -v /vmlinux
Finally I set the attribute of /dev/hda2 to bootable with fdisk.
Now I am unclear as to what I am suppossed to do; am I supposed to boot
from the floppy, but use the hard drive as my root device? When I do,
I can't seem to find anything else than the floppy (df only reports the
/dev/fd0 file). Then if I try to boot from the hard drive itself, I get
"Missing operating system", or "Invalid partition table" errors; it
seems that if I set two partitions to be bootable (e.g. DOS and Linux)
I get the latter error, but if I only set Linux to be bootable, I get
the former error.
There are a number of other problems I encounter during this process;
first of all, when I had only 2 megs of ram in the machine, I couldn't
mkfs a system greater than about 55000 blocks; it would report "Out of
memory". So I borrowed 2 Megs from another computer. This seemed to
fix it (I think). Then, when the computer is copying the files, it
stops when it is copying the files in the subdirectories /1 /24 /25
and so on; it gives an error message of : "%1 35 Memory fault-
core dumped," and doesn't copy any more stuff.
I have read the FAQ files, the fdisk documentation, hlu's instructions,
and many other files trying to find help, but I can't seem to find any.
I haven't yet checked the compatible-hardware list to see if my
hardware is compatible, though. Any ideas?
P.S. After all of this, I just decided to go and reformat my hard drive
for a total 214 meg dos partition; however when I boot off of a DOS 5.0
floppy and run DOS's fdisk, I can only partition the hard drive for
154 megs. I can live with this for now, but I wonder where the hell
did my other ~50 megs go!?!
-- corey@sdf.lonestar.org 214-296-0458 Corey Carroll