Disk information not correct on slackware install?

aeroegnr · 10-16-2007, 07:08 PM

Hello,

I'm trying to install Slackware 12.0 on a machine that currently has windows XP installed. I have two windows partitions already, both 80gb in size, and I have the second partition cleared. When I boot from the slackware cd and begin the install, both cfdisk and fdisk tell me that I only have 669MB on my disk. In addition, when I run cfdisk I get the message "opened disk read-only you have no permission to write".

I'm reluctant to try blindly manipulating my hard-drive when something doesn't seem right about the file size. I've tried going through the help menus to look at the options available to see if I could view my existing two 80gb partitions but I can't find anything promising.

If it helps, I have a dell dimension 9100.

larkl · 10-16-2007, 07:14 PM

Is the partition that you want to use formatted as NTFS or FAT32?
I would use a separate partitioning utility, here's one that I use.... http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
and I would remove the second partition completely. Then I would add a swap partition (unless you have >512M RAM) and a linux partition. Then reboot in the installation CD.

aeroegnr · 10-16-2007, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by larkl

Is the partition that you want to use formatted as NTFS or FAT32?

They're both NTFS, I'll take a look at the link, thank you.

arubin · 10-17-2007, 02:59 AM

Is this machine a laptop?

669MB seems to me like the size of a CD. I suspect that slackware is not seeing the hard disk at all. It might be worth googling to see if there is any parameter which needs to be passed to the kernel on booting.

aeroegnr · 10-17-2007, 08:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by arubin

Is this machine a laptop?

669MB seems to me like the size of a CD. I suspect that slackware is not seeing the hard disk at all. It might be worth googling to see if there is any parameter which needs to be passed to the kernel on booting.

It's a desktop. It wasn't seeing the partitions for whatever reason. I went through and used a GParted LiveCD and killed the extra windows partition and replaced it with a Linux swap and linux partition. I'm surprised how well everything worked after that (except for a problem with the graphics in GParted and an incorrect LILO installation for dual boot). The two mistakes I made were easy to recover from, knowing almost nothing about linux (first time ever trying!). I'm going to probably go through more of the manual so I can figure out how to get the software I want running.

I'm still using XP at the moment because I have a wireless connection and setting up the wireless is...involved.