Hi,

As newbie I am facing some serious troubles in installing Linux (Knoppix or Mepis) on my pc. I made boot cd's for Mepis3.3 and Knoppix3.4. My pc contains 2 SATA physical harddisks. On disk1 WinXP pro is running while I want to install Linux on disk2.

Disk1 partitioned with 2 partitions both NTFS.
Disk2 partitioned with 3 partitions Ext3, Linux swap, Ext3.

Mepis doesn't really start it stucks with a shell, asking for username and password on an ansi screen.

Knoppix from CD works but doesn't find any harddisk devices at all. So I can't install it on hdd.

I have read some threats about problems with SATA disks but don't know how to solve mine. Does anybody have a clue of what is going wrong here?

Please guide me?

thx in advance,
ezzy

NP dude, worry not, you're at LQ.org!

You are having classical SATA problems.

The first thing you need to know about SATA devices is, that they are not mapped to hdx (where x is a,b,c,d,e etc) but to sdx.
So the first disk would be sda, the second sdb etc.

The second thing you need to know about all sata devices on linux is that they work perfectly since kernel 2.6.9, and if your livecd was concieved before that, (do a cat /proc/version and see the kernel version) they might very well not work.

For a working livecd download the gentoo one (the only one i'm certain has got the right kernel). www.gentoo.org

It's a great distro for a noob, you'll learn lots. It's a shame to start with FC or Debian, you learn noting in months. But that's just me.

Any further questions?

Thx for info.

I am using Gentoo now with the extensive manual.... still having problems but now in another area...

But anyway I am maximizing my learning curve...

Cheers,
Ezzy

hee hee... That's great!

Hope gentoo serves you well... Sure serves me well

@Atom,

Please help me on the other threat i have posted. I am having serious problems after booting;
"VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown block (8,19)"
"Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS : Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (8,19)"

Any suggestions to solve this?

Thx

what did u do last??

did u recompile ur kernel???

Yes, I compiled again the kernel with menuconfig.

did u built that with ext2 FS support in the kernel not as modules???

the quest continues in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...17#post1594417

Just merging, so the debate isn't in two pieces.