SuSE 9.1 Personal Installation Problem
 

I'm running an Intel P4 w/ IDE 80 Gb HD (NTFS, master) and 8 Gb (Fat32, slave), but can't get recently purchased SuSE 9.1 personal to install.

The CD boots and begins to run the installation procedure, but stops before getting very far. The last several lines displayed say:

">>>SUSE Linux installation program v 1.6.19(c) 1996-2004 SUSE LINUX AG<<<
Starting hardware detection
>Block.5: get sysfs block dev data"

My first inclination was that it couldn't find my peripherals, so I disconnected all USB connections, leaving only standard mouse, keyboard and monitor connected and retried unsuccessfully (obviously).

After that I'm wondering if the installation can't partition NTFS the way it says it's supposed to be able to do, but I would prefer not to buy PartitionMagic if that isn't definitely the problem.

Any suggestions/advise? Much appreciated. Thanx.

I should specify that the NTFS master HD has WinXP loaded + data, and that I would prefer not to remove XP completely, just nudge it aside. Thanx.

few things. 1. is your hardware supported on the HCL for SuSe? that would be rather important, just as important as it is under windows.

if the HD with windows is the hangup, you can just unplug it for the install and tell SuSe it is the only OS, then you can change the BIOS to tell it to boot off the other HD when you want to get into linux or XP.

this works easier if you put each of the HDs as masters on IDE1/2 as some BIOS will not let you pick a slave to boot from.

The linux installation seems to recognize the HDDs. It lists thier names and drive size under hda and hdb, although I haven't been able to find my specific models on the HDL.

I've tried switching the two drives; I've tried formating the WinXP drive and reinstalling XP on 40 Gb with 40 Gb unformatted and nothing's worked yet.

Do you recommend any other solutions? Thanks for your help.

hippias - Welcome to LQ. It's unclear to me what the current condition of your 80G drive is -- is it entirely allocated to XP, with no available free space, or is it partitioned with half going to XP and the other half unallocated, free space? Obviously if it's the former, the installation will fail because there will be no room to install Linux into. If it's the latter, then you should be ready to go.

My recommendation would be to make the partitioning task separate from the installation. Believe me, it's much easier to deal with partitioning as a single project than it is to try to make it part of the installation. If you decide to go with 40G for XP and 40G for Linux, then at the end of the partitioning exercise you would want your 80G to be divided into 40G of NTFS, and 40G of unallocated free space. One excellent shareware utility program is BootIT NG which can handle both resizing an existing partition, as well as other common partitioning tasks. Good luck with it. Once you've got the partitioning out of the way, the Linux installation should proceed smoothly. -- J.W.