From: wgcho@cair.kaist.ac.kr (Cho Wongyu) Subject: Linux Install Problems: HELP!!! Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1993 05:25:58 GMT
Hello Linuxers!
I have some problems in installing linux0.99p2 to my 486DX.
Please don't say I should get linux0.99p4 since it is so hard to get the
whole bunch of files of tsx-11 from here. I'll patch it after I succeed with
this one:) I have 16MB of main memory and two IDE hard disks (first one
is 120MB and second one is 210MB). My problem is as follows.
I want to use both DOS and Linux from Harddisk. So the first thing I did was
to use the second hard disk for Linux and first for DOS. As written in the
documents, I did fdisk for the second disk with 'fdisk /dev/hdb' and made some
partitions. Then rebooted the system and did 'mkfs' on the partitions and
installed the softwares by 'doinstall'. After installing a1-a4 diskettes,
it asked me to put a freshly formatted disk into the drive to produce a bootable
diskette, so I did it.
Here came the first problem. After writing a while to the floppy, strange noise
came from the floppy drive with neverending messages 'Floppy read error' or
something like that. After trying with different diskettes in vain, I decided
to do this in another way. Reading the doinstall shell script, I found that
it does 'dd if=/root/Image of=/dev/fd0h1200', so I mounted the DOS partition
and copied /root/Image to it and used 'rawrite.exe' in DOS to make a boot
diskette. It worked.
However after checking all the devices and disk partitions the system hung with
the following messages,
MINIX-fs: unable to read superblock
EXT-fs: unable to read superblock
MSDOS bread failed
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev 0x343 iso_blknum 16
Kernel panic: Unable to mount root
The simplest guess of the cause of this error would be the disk was not ready
for the LINUX file system. So I rebooted with the distribution disks(a1 and a2),
mounted the Linux Hard Disk, and it worked perfectly. So this is not any 'mkfs'
problem. I guess the boot diskette can't find the root partition properly.
I tried this with putting LINUX at the first partition on the first drive,
and it still doesn't work.
Do you have any good ideas? Since it is *very* hard for me to follow up the
newsgroup from Korea, direct replies would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Wongyu
P.S. What is the best partition configuration for running both DOS and Linux
from my hard disk?