Installing Slack 13.37 on old laptop, fdisk does not recognize the hard drive.
 

Hey all,
Long time Slack user, thought I would try to update my old laptop (Toshiba Satellite with AMD K6-2 333 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive) from 10.2 to 13.37 in celebration of the newest version :-)

By update, I mean a complete wipe and reinstall, just to be clear.

So 10.2 runs well, everything looks shiny (XFCE of course) but when I try to install 13.37 I run into trouble. I figured out to boot with huge.s instead of hugesmp.s, but when I try to run 'setup' I get an error that says I have no partitions. mkay, I try fdisk (or cfdisk), but I get literally NO response - no error, no nothing but a return to the command promt. It is exactly as if fdisk does not recognize there is a hard drive there at all.

I boot back into 10.2,check the BIOS, everything looks fine, I have a drive mounted at /dev/hda1, swap at /dev/hda3. Are there some additional parameters I should be booting with? Does it matter that the hard drive is ATA?

Hi,

nowadays the partitions are mostly recognized as /dev/sda, /dev/sda1 and so on, even with old IDE-drives. You should tryMarkus

Markus,
Thanks for the response but I have already tried that. Indeed, fdisk -l also returns absolutely nothing.

I also tried cfdisk /dev/hda (or /dev/sda with the same result) and got a fun full-screen message

FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk.

Obviously one would think the hard drive is crap, but I can literally reboot and get into Slack 10.2 at any time. Adding the actual partition numbers (like hda1, sda1 etc) doesn't help either.

Can you confirm that the disk is recognized by the BIOS? and can you confirm that it's running? One should hear the disk rotating on such an old machine.

Markus

happened to me once, except that none of the slacware versions were finding my drives on an original xserveG4... ended up having to recompile a kernel enabling some kind of generic IDE option, and then they were found...

scanning /boot/config on 13.37, I noticed that BLK_DEV_HD is not set... you might need this if your drive is very old (MFM/RLL/ESDI drives)...

The BIOS sees the harddrive and as best I can tell it is spinning...the CD is quite loud but I'm pretty sure I can hear the drive both when I try to install 13.37 and when I run 10.2

Slack-in-the-box: I will explore this, thanks! But it doesn't look like exactly the same problem...

I also read somewhere that /dev/hd could have up to 63 partitions, but /dev/sd can only have 15... thus if you had more than 15 partitions on your drive, it will no longer be recognized...

if you have an extra partition handy, maybe you could boot into your 10.2 slackware, and then manually install 13.37 onto the extra partition... that way you can try different things without losing your working distro... things to try might be using UUID in lilo and fstab, or you can try different kernels..

Oh actually that's a great idea. I mean, I had given up and reformatted the drive to see if that helped but if I can get 10.2 back on it I migth have a shot of getting 13.37 to work.

Great! Thanks!

Check if you can upgrade your BIOS.
For me,that was a solution to install Slackware 13.1 on an IBM Pentium 3.

Good idea kkady, but as far I can tell my BIOS is upgraded - Toshiba Satellite 2545XCDT and I have version 8.0, the highest I could find out there.

I have a spare Pentium I class computer with a K6-3+ CPU, 256 MB RAM, and IDE 40 GB drive. I have 12.2 installed on that machine with the 2.6.27.59 kernel. CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE is set in my kernel config. That option is not set in my 13.1 system running the 2.6.33.15 kernel. That information likely won't help you with the kernels that come with setup, but might be needed for compiling newer versions of the kernel after installation. 12.2 is considered by many to be one of the best releases. Perhaps you could install 12.2 and then sequentially update to 13.0, 13.1, or 13.37?

If I recall correctly, 13.0 supported the hda device names and that stopped in 13.1. I'm guessing then perhaps you might be able to install 13.0 and then sequentially update to 13.1 and then 13.37. Possibly the best approach is work backwards in the releases until a setup disk recognizes the older IDE drive. Then sequentially update rather than install fresh.

Had a somewhat similar problem recently with a newer Toshiba laptop, did a lot of googling and it seems some Toshiba laptops in particular had buggy bioses. The laptop was ok on Slackware 13.1 and would boot and work with kernels up to 2.6.35.13, but would freeze with anything newer (including the one that ships with Slackware 13.37). I was able to get it to boot with the 13.37 kernel by experimenting with various kernel options, only to see that kernel fail to recognize or see the hard drive.

I eventually got around this by booting with a usbboot.img from Slackware 13.1 and then installing from a Slackware 13.37 iso. Once installed, you chroot into the 13.37 directory structure and compile an older kernel that would work for you, then you can try the incremental approach suggested above (ended up with 13.37 running on 2.6.35.13). Details are in the thread below in case you're bored :)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...lision-879734/