Uninstall/Reinstall Woody
 

I hope I'm in the correct forum, as I don't want to be reprimanded. I did read the policy.

I mistakenly installed Inews (innwatch or inn2) because I thought I was getting just a newsreader for newsgroups; I did not want a news server.

Woody hangs at boot with the message: "Starting internet superserver: inetd". I have to Control+D to finish booting. I have commented and uncommented inetd to no avail. When I shutdown, I have to Control+D to finish boot, as Woody hangs on shutdown with: "Stopping internet superserver: inetd". I have read 1000s of man and help pages and googled, so I have tried to solve this prob on my own.

I am having so many probs with cron, dcop, innwatch (inews) and others, that I want to uninstall stable Debian then reinstall it. What is the correct procedure for this? First step, 2nd step, etc.

I will be very grateful for any help.

Debian stable
PII MMX 320 RAM, 15GB hdd
Nvidia
SB PCI 16

TIA
vsj

Just boot up with cdrom #1 and start the install. When you get to the partitioning section, you can delete the old partitions and create new ones. Be careful not to remove any partitions that you want to keep

Thank you so very much, homey. I've transitioned from M$ to Linux and I'm loving Linux.

vsj

If you have any valuable data, backup them to another machine/harddisk/whatever.

If it took you a long time to configure something, backup the corresponding configuration files from /etc also.

Reboot from the Debian CD and install. When it comes to selecting harddisik partitions, select the alternative to partition the harddisk (sorry, can't remember the exact label of the menu option). Delete all existing Linux partitions (if you don't have another working Linux on that machine, that is) and create at least one big partition for the root filesystem and a smaller one (typically double size of physical RAM, but more than 512 MB will be overkill in most cases). Set type for the smaller one to "Linux swap".
Then "write" and "quit".

Continue to install, choose the newly created partition as root filesystem.


You can also use the old partioning scheme instead, but I don't have the steps in mind.

Hi & TYVM. I don't have any important thing on my debian partition yet. I have been unable to get debian running well enough to start putting files there.

My system looks like so:
hda1 (swap)
hda2 (dynebolic nest)
hda3 (Debian, ext2)
hda5 (Windows)

My 15gb hdd is divided into 3 partitions. Soon, I want to do away with the Windows partition and have a 2-partition drive.

I have the 7-cd Debian Linux set. My first Debian install was from the downloaded iso, burned to Cd. I tried booting from the 7-CD but my boot would only start in Debian. It would not detect the CD. It was changed in my BIOS to boot from cdrom, but it still only boots from my hda3.

Any suggestions?

vsj

Can you boot from other bootable CDs?

The first 4 (?) Debian CDs are all bootable, with different default kernels, so this looks like a problem of either your BIOS or your CD drive.

Some older CD drives don't support CD-RW, but if I understand you correct, you have a packaged 7 CD set, so we can exclude this.

Some BIOSes have two options:
- Set boot priority (e.g. CD -> HDD -> FDD)
- Enable/Disable boot devices (e.g. CD and FDD disabled, HDD enabled)
If you have one of these, ensure that CD is enabled.

TY all VM, for your help; I've checked and rechecked that my BIOS is set to boot from CD. It is. When I can't access the net from Debian, I use the Dynebolic CD to boot, so I know my BIOS and CD are correctly set. I just tried booting Debian, and I received the msg that "modprobe cannot create /var/log/kysmoops/20040210", then it hangs. I have to press the restart button to get out. I don't iknow what that msg is about. I was using KDE2. Is there a way to stop LILO from loading? If so, I can stop LILO then try rebooting from CD.

All help is greatly appreciated. TYVM.

I believe you can make a boot floppy from a floppy image in disk one. It's your bios not booting you into the cdrom and not lilo. Your bios has to activly give control to hard drive before it read the boot sector and start lilo. So if you can't get your bios to work right try and boot from a floppy.


Road

Thanks, Road;

I don't understand that it's my bios, because I have to tell it to read the Dynebolic CD when accessing the 'net.

Would it be possible to start a re-install with the Debian .iso CD then, during install when asked for program location, switch to the 7-CD set? I already have the burned Debian .iso.

Many thanks,