Goodday,

Last week I bought a new notebook. Today, I was trying to install slackware, but not without trouble.

First, this is the notebook. (Western Digital HD)

Second, I have the HD set on IDE mode, Live-CD's do work, winxp has no trouble with the harddrive, and I did try to load huge.i.

I'm total newbie when it comes to linux, so any help could be usefull.

Thanks,
w1z44rdy

Hi w1z44rdy, Welcome to lq. What trouble are you having? Are you getting errors, if so what errors? We'll need to know what the problem is to try and correct it.
Good luck. ;-)

Can you get to fdisk/cfdisk? How far into the installation do you get before you get an error? What is the error?

I'm sorry. I kinda forgot to mention the problem.

Well.. there are no errors, slack just doesn't know my hard disk. I can access cfdisk/fdisk but it only gives me a "read-only" partitiion, which I think is the DVD I'm installing from.

Any suggestions?

My suggestions:

1) In bios change SATA from native to legacy mode and try again
2) Change CHS and to LBA addressing and try again

rofl


Ok .. what does fdisk -l say ?

Also, you ARE installing slackware 12 right ?

And also, while the slackware Install boots up .. can you see anything about a sda or hda or your harddisk? Anything at all?

Please post what version of Slackware you're trying to install, this will help a lot in providing you with a specific solution.

You wanna try to boot a '.s' kernel.

If applicable to your Slackware version, might wanna read 'kernels/SATA-SUPPORT.TXT' in the root directory of the install DVD/CD.

weird , I can swear that Slack 11 came with a sata.i .. what was that for ?

Was it a kernel named sata that supported only IDE/CDRom? Just curious , btw.

Actually, I think they should be two separate things. SATA does not depend on SCSI support. So, sata.i can support SATA, but not SCSI.

Unfortunately, I don't know what version of Slackware the thread starter has, so how can I make a reasonable recommendation ? Well, I can't, other than reading some the text files that come with whatever version they have.

yeah, but SATA drives come in as sdX while IDE drives come in as hdX , USB devices to come in as sdX .. as USB is SCSI I thought same is true for SATA

What do you type?

> cfdisk /dev/sda

Something like that?

Okay, some people aren't listening.

1) Is your hard drive detected at boot?

Type:

dmesg |grep sda

to find out.

2) Are you running cfdisk on the right drive (Clue: No, You probably aren't, as those people above are trying to tell you).

Type:

cfdisk /dev/sda

(or whatever your drive appears as).

CFDisk, by default, goes for your first hd?? device, which will probably be an IDE CD drive in a modern SATA PC, rather than the primary hard drive as it was in pure-ATA computers.

You have to TELL it to use your drive (sata appear as pseudo-SCSI drives, believe it or not, so they appear as sd?? instead).

3) Always, always, always, when you have a problem, pay attention to the screen and boot messages. A quick look at dmsg or boot-time messages will show you that you've got an SDA not an HDA device appearing. A quick look at the top of cfdisk will show you what device it's TRYING to partition. A quick look at cfdisk --help will show you what you need to do to get it to look at SDA.

Everyone mentioning kernels and this and that at this early stage of diagnosis should be taken outside and shot. Or made to work in a IT department.

Thanks for all above answers. They have all expanded my tiny knowledge of linux.

Anyway, yesterday night when I posted my last reply, I found out that I could select "an unknown NTFS partition" as installtarget on the setup menu. Knowing that such thing was possible, I booted with hiren's disk and made the rest of the hard drive space, which I had left unused for slack, NFTS. (I also created a swap on the fly) After I restarted with the slack 12 DVD, I just selected the NTFS I had just made. So with other words: I got it up and running. Though, (c)fdisk was still pointing at my DVD drive, which was confusing me.

So if anyone finds this post through a search session and wants the solution: just use partition - or hd tools to set your hd ready. I guess you wont even be searching this if you know how to make (c)fdisk point at the correct drive.

Anyway, thanks for the replies,
w1z44rdy

First off I told him to do fdisk -l

that would have given us most of what you are trying to get!


The only problem is I think the op has gone off somewhere ... and I don't know about you but I am here to learn, so although I do care a little what the op wants to solve, it is not my primary concern or else I would be in IT support. If I find a topic of interest in which my knowledge is weak, then I will discuss it! And its not as if I am not solving the op's problems. I never asked him to look at the kernel and all .. I only asked him to do fdisk -l, the discussion about kernels was only with others.

What are you talking about ? I recently tried installing Slackware 11.0 on a new computer with a SATA HDD. I had never done this before so I just used the default kernel. Well, there was absolutely no way it would detect the SATA HDD, because it didn't have any SATA drivers built-in. In fact it only detected the CD-ROM drive. Then I tried 'huge26.s' and it detected the HDD just fine. I ran cfdisk and it was there, I partitioned it and the install went fine. It certainly could have been the kernel. Also, cfdisk is quite automated, it will detect a HDD if it is connected, fdisk is not so automated, you may have to specify which drive to partition.