I just installed Slackware 9.1 after being converted over from Red Hat...

I had a couple of install issues I'd like to share with you. Hopefully you can shed some light on this (I'm still very new to this world).

1. During install, I created 4 primary partitions - 1 for root (/), one for /USR, one for /Home, and a swap partition. Farther down the installation I was asked where I wanted to mount these partitions. The default location was /USR/Local, but I didn't really understand the question, so I typed '/'. What did I do? What was I supposed to do?

2. Toward the end of the installation I was asked whether or not to Install LILO. I chose not to - figuring I would not be booting any other OS.

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After rebooting my computer, the only thing appearing on my screen was

GRUB:

This happened after the computers BIOS loads, and prior to any OS stuff loading up.

Did I mess up the installation?

"Did I mess up the installation?" - yes
you need a bootloader no matter how many operating systems you have (unless you don't have any, in which case you have a more serious problem)
also, do you need to partition your drive(s) like that?
i can understand if have 4 hard drives you'd want to spread the system across all of them, but if you're only using one it's not neccesary.
also, the capitalisation:- _BAD_, linux is case-sensitive, so any programs that try to access /usr (all of them) will not find anything
same with /Home
i would recommend reinstallation with 2 partitions (a swap partition and a root), but if you like your drive like that you can just edit /etc/fstab to get rid of the capitals, then install LILO.
i don't know if it's installed the files to your hard drive, but the GRUB that you see at boot time is left over from redhat
you could download and install GRUB, and then you could just configure it and your troubles would be over, or you could configure LILO (edit /etc/lilo.conf) and run /sbin/lilo on your hard drive.
this is of course assuming you have a rescue disc.

During the installation process, I'm noticing that a lot of the files can't be written to disk because there is no more free space left. I only have 3 partitions on my 8GB drive, including the swap (750MB, the root, 105MB, and the balance (7.2 GB) as the 3rd partition.

I believe the choice I make at the following prompt may have something to do with this:


Is this causing my installation to install to the root, thereby run out of disk space before the installation is completed?

the slack cd 2 is a great rescue disk.... try that.

i second the opinion to just do a swap and a root. it does aid performence to put the different partitions on different parts of the drive, but with modern hardware you won't see as much difference.

lilo is fairly easy to use. i haven't tried too much, but i never have been able to really config grub without some sort of tool. lilo has a nice and easy setup, and all you do is man lilo.conf to find out everything you need about the config file, then run lilo.

good luck

After it selects your swap device and activates it, etc. If you already have your partitions setup it will go to these steps to setup the mount points.

It will always ask which parition you want mounted for / first since its required. You will want to select the correct partition to install to that you've setup. Then it will ask for the others and you can type in the mount you want.

And I would suggest using more than 100megs if your only creating /, /usr and /home with a swap.

And why is swap 750 megs and / only 100 or so? If this is a desktop machine and you have more than 128mb of RAM you really have no reason to exceed a 200mb swap partition.

Red Hat (my last Distro) had set Swap to 750MB because I have 384MB RAM...as for the Root, it had set it to 105MB previously. I thought the root was supposed to be small. Should I make it small or bigger?

As for the whole mount point thing for /dev/hda 2, I'm still confused by this question. I will try defaulting to /usr/local, but I'm still not sure why the installation is running out of space.


-Andrew

How big or what is the amount of space here were dealing with?

Its probably running out of space cause you could have setup the wrong partitions to install to. Majority of the packages will actually install to /usr and reside in /usr/bin and not in /usr/local. But that doesn't matter since they will be mounted all on the same partition.

I would suggest:

200mb - swap
500mb - /
2gb - /usr
rest of space - /home

I only say put more space in / as your /tmp and /var files will end up residing on the same partition. This is where your logs reside and tmp files which can grow rather quickly. You don't want to have / filled one day, it makes it complicated to boot up to..

If at all possible, I always suggest at least creating /tmp and /var on their own partitions, etc, just for this reason.

All previous install issues mentioned in this thread have been cleared, but now when I reboot I still get "GRUB".

COmputer resets, BIOS stuff loads, then "GRUB" is displayed". No OS loads.

Does this have something to do with the Boot option at the very end of Slackware setup?

I had 3 choices:

1. Boot from Superblock
2. Boot from floppy
3. Boot from Master Boot Record.

I chose Superblock because I told it was the safest choice. Should I have chosen MBR?


-Andrew

Yes, cause since you seeing Grub: at boot time, its still reading your original grub loader in your MBR that most likely Redhat installed. You will want to install Lilo in its place to overwrite the MBR.