Large Hard Drive / Slackware 8 issues
Ok, severe brain damage from childhood has reared its ugly head. I can not for the life of me get slackware to install ona 20gig drive, nor redhat. However, mandrake does just fine. I have tried to name seperate partitions, etc, reset heads via fdisk, etc, and nothing seems to work. After the supposedly smooth install, it just hangs. Ive tried with and without lilo, etc. any ideas besides therapy would be greatly appreciated
:p |
Where does it hang? What is the last message you get?
|
Well I have a problem with my Slackware 8.0 install if I try to set a swap partition directly over a swap partition already created by Partition Magic. The system hang at this time If I try and i have to reboot. Maybe it's the same problem?
|
slack8 large hd...
everything installs as normal at least as far as the standard routine goes, hwever when it reboots, it dies right after the bios flag. just sits there and does nothing, no messages, no errors, no lilo, nadda
|
This makes me think that lilo didn't get installed properly. A couple of things to check:
Make sure that in cfdisk that your primary partition is set as bootable. Here's what I have in my /etc/lilo.conf lba32 #you probably need this because you have a large drive boot = /dev/hde #probably /dev/hda for you ... image = /vmlinuz root = /dev/hde2 #may be /dev/hda1 for you...depending on where your data is |
Is this the first disk that is /dev/hda because sometimes LILO won't work off anything but the first. What drive are you installing to?
|
slackware 8 issues/large hd
i finally got it to work, heres how i did it anyway..
slack 8.2 beta 20 gig fujitsu drive [yes, i know...] asus slot1 muddabored 256 meg ram 3dlabs oxygen dual head video [ uses permidia drivers, do NOT configure independantly] i made 3 partitions: root 3gig home 18.5 gig rest as swap from this point a did a standard everything type of install, auto , install everthjing, etc... EXCEPT when it came time to install lilo, i had to install lilo on the MBR, and not the root drive partition. and had to manually enter in /etc/fstab /dev/hda1, even tho program said it was allready done, i had to do it manually dont know why, but this is the only way i could get it to work, i did it the day after the original post, and its been running a bot, an ircd and an ftp, all with no probs ever since hope this helps..... oh yeah, i did not have to pass the lba32 mode thingy to the kernal, but i think thats because the 8.2 beta uses the 2.4 versus the 2.2 kernel... |
"oh yeah, i did not have to pass the lba32 mode thingy to the kernal, but i think thats because the 8.2 beta uses the 2.4 versus the 2.2 kernel..."
The lba32 is a lilo thingy, the kernel figures all this out on its own. I think that this option is installed by default with Slack-8 because I always have to replace it with "linear" to get my SCSI drives to boot. I think Mandrake is using Grub instead of Lilo these days, which is probably why it works. Maybe I should learn Grub too. It is probably possible to make Lilo work, but it will require a lot of reading to figure out where it is getting confused. |
Lilo on Large HD with Older BIOS
I know there are probably better ways to this this, but this is how I overcome these difficulties.
Partition the HardDrive so the first partion is 10 MB large, partition the rest of the system as I normally would. Mount that little 10 MB as /boot. Proceed with install, let slack create a boot floppy.. The first time after install, I have to boot with the floppy. I copy the kernel to my /boot directory (the 10MB partition). configure LILO so it installs to that partition and boots from that kernel. And voila, no more messing around with Large Drive options and LBA32 (that only works with Post 98 BIOS's, I think) |
Re: slackware 8 issues/large hd
Quote:
Earlier versions of slack had a version of lilo which didn't like to boot from partitions which were past block 1024. So if you ever put your root(boot) partition past that mark, that may have some impact. Also, MBR is indeed the necessary place to put the lilo boot. If you only use the root block of the root partition, it won't boot without the aid of a boot floppy or some other sort of boot loader (NTloader etc) Generally swap (on a machine which is expected to have some sort of load) should be at least twice the size of your physical RAM, some people use up to 3 times. Also be aware that anything not under /home will be in the / partition in the scheme above. This includes /tmp, /usr, /opt, /var and many others which can become quite large, depending on how you use the system (ie /opt usually has kde, gnome, interbase and many others. /var is where most programs will log to, make .pid files and other such stuff. /tmp is as it suggests a system wide temporary holding place. X uses lots of tmp files, shell users who un-tar their 350MB tar balls etc ;) /usr is where a lot of software is installed. The list goes on.) If some program starts going crazy and generating 3MB logs every 10 seconds, or a user decides to unpzk that 350MB tarball, or your ftp server logs into it's own directory unders /usr/share/ftp/logs etc your root partition will fill up and anything else that wants to write to that partition will fail and your system could come to a screeching halt, or at least services will start failing. It's best in a production system to make a separate partition for each of such directories, that way, if only one part fails, the rest of the system should be ok to go along it's merry way. Of course if this is just a home use comptuer, and 24 hour availability of services isn't crucial, feel free to partition your drive as you like. you probably will anyway ;) cheers, tifkat |
Re: Re: slackware 8 issues/large hd
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
Re: Re: Re: slackware 8 issues/large hd
Quote:
Quote:
I did say, or some other sort of boot loader (NTloader etc) so I believe I covered this point ;) It seems however, that he has his box setup as Linux only, so I think we've both covered it well :D Quote:
I made the point only to suggest that if he had already assigned 21.5GB of a 20 GB disk, he wouldn't have very much swap left, and should consider a better partitioning scheme. :) Quote:
Cheers, tifkat |
Re: Re: Re: Re: slackware 8 issues/large hd
Quote:
Funny How we can argue but be on the same side of the issue. |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 12:57 AM. |