Having trouble loading SuSe 9.1
 

I am a Linux novice and have decided to dive into the Community by loading SuSe 9.1 on my old computer. It is an IBM Aptiva, 3 GB hard drive, 166mhz MMX Pentium with a Hitachi CDR-8130 cd-rom. I have the BIOS set to boot from a CD first. I insert the CD and restart my computer, but it blows past the CD and boots into Windows. I am open to suggestions as to what the problem may be and how to overcome it.

No idea whats happening, but you might want to build the boot floppies that come in the install cd, as well. Post again, if you want guidance on how to do it.

Bruno, thank you. Yes I would appreciate help in building the boot floppies.

Hi Raveck,
I'm afraid that before we start, you might want to check the minimum requirements for installing suse - or any other linux. How much ram do you have?
You can, of course, build the floppies and let the installation decide. But it can be a bit frustrating, if at a certain point the install process says "Can't install, minimum requirements not met..." or something like that.

That said, the boot floppies stuff is:

The images to be recorded on the floppies are located in the first cd, in /boot/modules1, /boot/modules2, etc.... modules5. Five total. You see, 1.4MB sized, they are images of the install floppies.
To write these images to floppies using a win computer, you can use the utilities at the /dosutils dir, in the cd. The main one is rawrite.exe, very easy to run. You have to have five floppies handy and the images. Launch rawrite and follow the instructions on the program.

To create the floppies using a linux computer, use the same images, but the command to write them to floopies will be:

cd /where_CD1_is_mounted/boot
dd if=modules1 of=/dev/fd0u1440

Repeat it until the five are written.

The suse readme files are very easy to follow. Take a look.
/boot/README.DOS and /boot/README

Post again if it fails.

Bruno,

There are no boot disk images or modules in the boot directory of my CD. My CD looks like the following:
/boot
/docu
/media.1
/suse

Under /boot I have
/boot/loader
/boot/directory.yast
/boot/resuce
/boot/root
/boot/readme

Under /boot/loader I have
/boot/loader/linux 1.435 MB
/boot/loader/isolinux.cfg 1 K
/boot/loader/isolinux 15K BIN File
/boot/loader/initrd
and 6 numbered Shockwave Flash files all about 70-80 K

Nowhere else on the disk can I find anything described as modules, boot disks, or dos utils. I did, however, download the three boot disks from a SuSe 9.1 mirror site and loaded them onto disks with rawwritewin.exe. Those didn't work either. Should I go to the mirror site and do the same thing, but with the Modules?

Thanks again,

Raveck

Is this cd the pro or the personal edition?
Post here the complete link to the boot disks you downloaded, so I can check it.
Did you do a md5 check sum on the files downloaded?
Also, post here whats inside the floppy you just created with rawritewin.
Mine looks like:

initrd 1.3 MB root root
module.config 1.3 KB root root

Bruno,

I have the personal edition.

No I did not check the MD5 (oops). The site is:
python.planetmirror.com/ftp/suse/i386/9.1/boot/

Also, I missed in your last post the memory issue. I have 64mb of RAM which is the system minimum. I know that is not the recomended, but this is not going to be used as a high performance machine. I am in learn/experiment mode and it makes a good lab rat.

Also, I missed in your last post the memory issue. I have 64mb of RAM which is the system minimum. I know that is not the recomended, but this is not going to be used as a high performance machine. I am in learn/experiment mode and it makes a good lab rat.

Of course! Be welcome! I just didn't want you to go through all that labour to find out in the end, that you can't run the system.
*****

Sorry, I made a few mistakes before: the modules disks are suplementary. The bootdisks are the principal ones. I was thinking vice versa.

What do you see on your just created bootdsk1 floppy with rawritewin?

I see:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 27039 2004-04-07 09:10 06400480.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 39609 2004-04-07 09:10 08000600.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 54425 2004-04-07 09:10 10240768.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76739 2004-04-07 09:10 12801024.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 81208 2004-04-07 09:10 14001050.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 94097 2004-04-07 09:10 16001200.spl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 229376 2004-04-07 09:10 bootlogo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1338026 2004-04-07 09:10 initrd
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 14068 2004-04-07 09:10 ldlinux.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1468815 2004-04-07 09:10 linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 465 2004-04-07 09:10 message
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 486 2004-04-07 09:10 readme.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 770 2004-04-07 09:10 syslinux.cfg

You insert the floppy in the machine, reboot, but the machine won't even touch it during boot? Did you set the bios to look for floppies?

Ok,

I'm not sure what happened, but there is nothing on the disk (that could be a problem....:) ). Now, realize that I am downloading and writing the files from my Win XP box. So, I went back to the mirror site and looked at the files. They are not labeled as images, they are generic files. Did I get the wrong thing?

I ftp'ed to the mirror site and did a "get" to retrieve the files. I then used rawwritewin to copy the files over to disk. When I look at the disk, there is nothing there. What did I miss?

Raveck

Well, this is more fixable than to have a hardware related problem, if your computer can't boot from floppies...

Did you try to use rawrite, instead of rawritewin? The folks from your ftp site smartly displayed the readme page alongside with the links to dirs and files. Try to follow those instructions.

You will know that the floppy is ok when you see those files I have listed in the post above.

Obs - The correct images are:

http://python.planetmirror.com/ftp/s.../boot/bootdsk1
http://python.planetmirror.com/ftp/s.../boot/bootdsk2
http://python.planetmirror.com/ftp/s.../boot/bootdsk3

Bruno,

One other thing. Would I gain myself some ease in this process if I booted into Knoppix and tried to pull down and copy the bootdisks using it? I've only played with knoppix a little so, I'm not sure of what my limitations are going to be there.

Raveck

Yes, you can build the floppies from a knoppix running system, if you want to avoid rawrite.

1. Have the three bootdsk's saved in your hd.
2. Boot knoppix
3. Mount the device where the images are.
4. Open a console and do "dd if=/path/to/the/images/bootdsk1 of=/dev/fd0"
If it succeed you will notice the floppy activity, saving the image on the floppy.

Bruno,

Thanks. I was able to get the images copied to disk and begin the install progress using the floppies. Now, I have hit the memory problem. It is telling me that there is not enough memory to run YaSt and wants the path to use swap space on the hard drive. Since the OS hasn't loaded yet, I haven't partitioned swap space. Can it use the virtual memory space created by Windows 95? If so, how would I set the path to use that space. Thanks.

Raveck

Can it use the virtual memory space created by Windows 95? If so, how would I set the path to use that space. Thanks.

I guess you can't.

Which options does it give you?
Can you partition the hd with yast or it won't load at all?
Can you run knoppix and create a swap partition from it?
Is this hd blank or does it have important data? If its blank, its very easy with knoppix.

All it does is ask me for the path to the swap space. Yast will not load at all. And Knoppix won't boot from the CD on the older machine. If I used fdisk in DOS to create a partition to be used as swap, would that work? How would I designate it as swap space that Linux will recognize?

Thanks