Installing Gentoo
 

I downloaded the installcd for gentoo

I'm reading the docs and just getting started when I fdisk...

I get an error saying I cannot write to partition tables because sector size is 2048 (not 512).

I have poked aorund google a bit and found little on the subject. It seems Linux assumes a sector size of 512, so this is something I need to set in a conf file I assume???

Which file and where is it?

Secondly, while fdisk-ing about when prompted to select first and last cylinders, I noticed Gentoo didn't prompt me for the last cylinder and then noticed Gentoo was only displaying a single cylinder???

This is faulty as I'm looking at my BIOS right now and according to it, I have:

C: 1024
H: 255
S: 63
CHS Capacity: 8422MB
LBA Capacity: 30020MB

The latter is what I obviously want. How do I use LBA mode instead of CHS? I assume it's the first issue I raise which is causing Gentoo to not find any cylinders *except* for one???

Any ideas???

p.s-This is a latest Gentoo I just D/L and burnt to CD

Cheers :)

cfdisk
Graphical fdisk. I think it has an option for LBA/CHS.

If you are running the minimal installation CD you would do a lot better to download. burn, and run the Live CD. You can read the on line documentation while you build your operating system.

I've never heard about fdisk complaining about block size because that is determined when you create a file system. Do you have an old motherboard/BIOS? It seems like I haven't even seen an LBA or direct access option in a motherboard BIOS for ages. If I recall correctly you want the LBA option.

One thing you should be aware of with Gentoo. It is configured very very differently than other Linux distributions. Gentoo is a lot of fun. I run a Gentoo machine for kicks. But it is not a good distro if you want to learn the Unix way of configuring things. In other words you can't port your Gentoo expertise to HP-UX or to Solaris or any other true Unix. Gentoo is just too different.

I used to use Gentoo.. and after switching to Slackware I'm far happier. Just as fast without the hassle. Just my opinion mind.

I'm switching between Slack, Gentoo and Debian. :)
Gentoo is a nice distro if your patient to wait all that compiling...

How did you modify the partitions? "fdisk /dev/sda1" or "fdisk /dev/sda"?

What would be the best disttibution(s) for that?

Slackware definetly :D

Slack doesn't have much tools to aid you in your task so you need to do them by hand which will teach you on how to do these things. I'd recommend it for you. The installation is quick but the configuration takes longer then.

Problem Solved
 

While installing Gentoo AMD64 onto my machine, I had an encounter with this problem. A friend helped me solve the issue by teaching me this command.

dmesg | grep hd

Now when I ran it on my computer we realized that my problem wasn't the hardware configuration but it was hitting the wrong device.

testing NMI watchdog ... OK.
ide0: BM-DMA at 0x20b0-0x20b7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hda: ATAPI DVD DD 2X16X4X16, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: HDS722580VLAT20, ATA DISK drive
hdb: max request size: 512KiB
hdb: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB) w/1794KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: cache flushes supported
hdb: hdb1
hda: ATAPI 63X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog: NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex
e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog: 10/100 speed: disabling TSO

What this means is that most likely your harddrive is linked to the ide cable in the slave position instead of the master, and another device such as your cd-rom (my case) is on the master of the ide cable.

The best way to resolve this issue is to seperate the two devices and put each on there own ide and both on master. However, if that is not possible in your situation as it is in mine, you might have to leave it as is and just use "fdisk /dev/hdb" instead of "fdisk /dev/hda"

Regards,
Joshua....aka "Joomster"

You were right. :)