Help,

I don't know what I did but somehow almost all 20GB of my drive is now on disk /dev/hdd.. how do I move some of this memory to /dev/hda ?

fdisk -l gives me

disk /dev/hda: 4311MB
15 heads 63 sectors/track, 8912 cylinders

disk /dev/hdd: 20.0GB
16 heads 63 sectors/track, 38792 cylinders

I believe I need to move some of this 20GB to /hda in order to boot properly??

Thanks in advance,

F

So, /dev/hda was once 20GB, and now its somehow only 4311MB you mean to say?

Which distro are you using, and what computer are you running it on?

Did you try to reformat the disk with cfdisk? Try using GParted instead--cfdisk has been nothing but trouble for me.

hda and hdd are drive designations and not partitions. If you are posting it correctly, it means you have two drives.

Forget cfdisk for the moment. Do fdisk -l and copy and paste the complete output.

Do you have any other devices connected to the ide bus (other than the 20GB HD)?

Thanks for the replies.

Well, /dev/hda was once 3GB, with (+/-)17GB on /dev/hdd. I used DBAN to wipe the machine, now am trying to install Knoppix from the live CD, but when I boot it tells me there is not enough memory to start KDE.

I don't know of anything else connected to the IDE .. I will post the full output of 'fdisk -l' in a while. Also will research Gparted.

Thanks,

F

So--do you have 2 drives???

This is not a hard drive issue---it is telling you there is not enough RAM---how much RAM do you have?

(Note: Better not to refer to hard drive space as "memory". The more typical usage is that RAM=memory and HD size = storage capacity.)

No, there is only one 20GB hard drive:

AMD K-6 3D
92.0 MB RAM
350 MHz 64kb cache

....

I would like to somehow move 3-5GB from /dev/hdd to /dev/hda, not worried about losing any data as I nuked the hard drive with DBAN disk .

I will post the results from 'fdisk -l' when I get to the machine ...

Thanks,

Are you by any chance booting Knoppix from a dvd?

No, booting from a CD.

fdisk -l gives me
----------------------------------------------------
Disk /dev/hda: 4311MB, 4311982080 bytes
15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8912 cylinders
units = cylinders of 945*512 = 48340 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 8912 4210919+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdd: 20.0GB, 20020396032 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38792 cylinders
units = cylinders of 1008*512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

-----------------------------------------------------

I've not Partitioned /dev/hdd yet

fdisk is claiming that there are two drives. <<Edit>>

So, you are booting from the Knoppix CD...I'm pretty sure it has QTParted---try that and see what it tells us.

You said Knoppix would not start KDE, but I assume you are issuing commands like fdisk from the command-line?

Finally, check the BIOS settings at startup to see what it thinks is connected to all the ide positions.

I said something incorrect in the last post (now removed). I had forgotten that devices on the ide bus get numbered by position and not just in sequence. Thus it appears you have **something** mounted as primary master (hda), and then your 20GB drive at secondary slave (hdd).

Still want to know what the bios tells us....

Yes booting from knoppix CD, it gives me a message:

"There are only 75540kB of RAM available, " .. something .. "this not enough to start KDE ".. something .. ". You can try to create a so-called swap file on an existing DOS partition (if available) in the next step."

I hit OK, then a message

"Sorry, no usable partitions for swapfile"

hit OK, it then loads with a console window on a desktop backround .. (can't get qtparted to run from here). I then type 'sudo init 1' to get into runlevel 1. Here is where I do 'fdisk -l'.

Also,

(IDE 0,1,1,-,-) ST320413A
(IDE 0,0,0,-,-) ST34323A


?

What is this and how does it relate to the rest of the discussion?

You are dealing with a marginal computer--one thing to consider would be adding more memory. (I think) if you create a swap partition on the drive than Knoppix will see it when you boot the CD.

Yes I know 90MB isn't much RAM, I was going to add more soon.

Strange thing is I had knoppix installed on the hard drive & it was working good, I just wanted to clean everything from the HD & re-install from scratch. I figured I'd wipe the drive with this 'DBAN' disk I burned -

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

That is where I saw that (IDE 0,1,1,-,-) stuff; since you were asking about what devices are connected to the IDE bus..

Side note, last night I fired it up with knoppix CD & hit F2 for options, & found something called 'memtest', I ran this & it seemed to pass, also it recognized the machine has 92MB RAM.

Any ideas would be appreciated !

/Fonds

Was there ever a time when it would boot from the live CD?

How did you originally get Knoppix on the drive?

What version of Knoppix?

You might consider simply installing something else--eg Kubuntu or Mepis. I think, however, that you may have trouble with any distro with that minimal RAM. (But you said it worked before....)

Yes, I installed knoppix 4.0 on this machine previously with the exact same CD, which is why I am so confounded; also tried the boot&nuke disk a second time, gives me the same problems... argh. Thanks for the responses, I'll keep messing with it & let you know what if anything works!

F