Installing slackware on a vaio

soulseraph · 05-14-2006, 03:27 PM

Hi, I was wondering if I could get a little help with installing slackware on my laptop. I already removed windows xp, and im trying to partition my hard drive but apparantly my BIOS isn't recognizing my larger harddrive (80gb) and is only recognizing a smaller one, which is 666 mb. This obvious and obnoxious act of Satan himself leads me to seek help from people who know a bit more about this, as i've never installed linux before (I do have the knoppix live cd but i really want to use slackware). I'm not even sure if its that my bios isnt recognizing the larger hard drive, but thats my best guess. If someone could help me exorsize my computer, it would be much appreciated. Any recommendations for what i should do?

edit: would have put this in the subforum if i had been more observant. sorry!

Samoth · 05-14-2006, 04:31 PM

What are you partitioning the disk with? try booting the slackware disk and then running

Code:

fdisk /dev/hda

assuming that your harddisk is that device. The reason I would guess that the bios only detects a 666 mb drive is it doesn't support drives larger than that. That doesn't mean that Linux wont by far but I would guess that is what happened. You only have one harddrive in a laptop! ;-). When fdisk starts up, make new partitions with fdisk. fdisk will tell you everything you need to know. alternatively you can run cfdisk.

soulseraph · 05-14-2006, 04:51 PM

cfdisk is working just fine, but the issue is that i have a 80gb hard drive and it isnt detecting any more than 666mb. How can I update the BIOS so that it is able to? I belive slackware requires a little over 1gb to install but i dont even have that. Currently fedora 5 is on my computer but an outdated udev is causing the computer to stop. The question I guess is how can I update my bios?

gbonvehi · 05-14-2006, 05:44 PM

Can you tell us the exact model number?
How are you checking that's not being recognized?
Try: fdisk -l
and: dmesg | hd
I know some laptops have a small recovery partition, maybe that's what you're seeing.

soulseraph · 05-14-2006, 06:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gbonvehi

Can you tell us the exact model number?
How are you checking that's not being recognized?
Try: fdisk -l
and: dmesg | hd
I know some laptops have a small recovery partition, maybe that's what you're seeing.

Okay. Sorry, I was going with what a friend said about the system (he uses gentoo) and I'm starting to think he's wrong. Let me start from the top..

Model Number: VGN-S580

When I enter

Code:

fdisk /dev/hda

What returns is

Code:

You will not be able to write the partition table.
Device contains neither valid DOS partition table, nor SUN, SGI, or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will be saved in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

Warning: Invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

I'm not sure what to do after that. My computer currently has fedora 5 as previously stated, and that isnt recognized either when I return 'p' in fdisk; only the 666.25 mb partition. I looked at my bios settings (after my post >< sorry.) and it recognizes an 80gb hard drive, so it isn't the bios.

fdisk -l returned nothing
dmesg | hd returned "hd: No such file or directory."

Thank you for helping by the way, I really appreciate it.

theoffset · 05-14-2006, 07:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by soulseraph

dmesg | hd returned "hd: No such file or directory."

I think he means
dmesg | grep "hd"

soulseraph · 05-14-2006, 07:14 PM

Okay. Entering "dmesg | grep "hd"" returned

Code:

    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1880-0x1887, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
hda: UJDA765aDVD/CDRW, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hda: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hda: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

What can I do with this? It seems like its reading my cd drive as /dev/hda, which would explain why I wasn't allowed to write anything to it, as well as (when checked) the amount of information on the cd is infact 666.25mb. How can I fix this?

soulseraph · 05-14-2006, 09:54 PM

Stil having troubles. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

gbonvehi · 05-14-2006, 10:36 PM

Yeap, definitly your CD reader is being detected as hda. What kind of harddrive do you have? Try using sata.i CD when booting instead of default bare.i.

By the way, i've just checked that laptop's specs and it comes with a 40 gb hdd :/

PS: Read forum rules, it's not allowed to "bump" a thread in less than 24 hours without an answer.

soulseraph · 05-15-2006, 12:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gbonvehi

Yeap, definitly your CD reader is being detected as hda. What kind of harddrive do you have? Try using sata.i CD when booting instead of default bare.i.

By the way, i've just checked that laptop's specs and it comes with a 40 gb hdd :/

PS: Read forum rules, it's not allowed to "bump" a thread in less than 24 hours without an answer.

Sorry about double posting. Won't happen again.

And you my friend are a god among men. 'sata.i' works great. Thank you much!