Hi everyone,

I need a boot floppy that comes with a program that I can use to format my hard drive. I just tried doing an HDD install of DamnSmall right over a Windows 95 system (this is an old computer), it seems to have installed fine (I installed GRUB too), but when it rebooted, it said "missing operating system". My next plan of attack is to get some formatting program, format my HDD into fs2, and install DamnSmall over again.

Thanks.

It sounds as if you did not install Grub to the Master Boot Record.. did you install it somewhere else by chance ? (possibly /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda ?)

grub-install /dev/hda

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i...nstalling_Grub

I would boot from teh DSL CD again and try that command, it may fix your boot issue.

I booted to DSL, runlevel 2 (text mode), punched in grub-install /dev/hda, and got "/dev/cloop does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"...any ideas?

What type of Hard drive is your boot drive ?

IDE, SATA, SCSI, Other ?

IDE...i believe...

If you have a Debian CD available, it does a pretty good job reformatting your HD (at least for creating free space). If you don't want Debian, you can abandon the installer after the partitioner is finished.

Well, to make matters worse, I can't boot off any Linux CD (except, suprisingly, Knoppix 3.2). Everything else gives me and ISOlinux BIOS error (something about my BIOS being so damaged, that I should just junk my PC and not bother with it (paraphrasing of course )). I booted DSL off a floppy, after which it started reading the CD fine...so I come back to my original question...I need a floppy off which I can format and partition my drive.

Thanks.

Partitioning and format can be done using Knoppix 3.2.

Can you please elabourate? Keep in mind, I can't use tools such as KDE and Gnome (because it's a P133 with 24MB RAM), so I'd have to use text mode...

4 programs to look at, read the manual pages, and examples..

man fdisk
man parted
man mke2fs
man tune2fs


if the drive is the Master Drive on the Primary IDE Controller

fdisk /dev/hda
follow menus to create partitions, etc..

mke2fs -j /dev/hda1 to format partition 1 on the drive as ext3

If you just plan to install linux on the machine it may be bnest to just delete all the partitions, thenboot the instal CD for the version of linux you wish to install and allow it to create and format the partitions it needs..



If you have multiple drives in your sytem be careful what you do, if you delete the partitions on the wrong drive you will not be recovering data from it later on..

Thanks all for your help. I was trying to format a completely broken drive. I would have been better off hitting it with a giant mallet. Anyway, I pulled out another HD out of my closet, and everything is peachy. Thanks everyone.