Hi, first of all, i think i'm losing my mind. I'm laid on my bed in front of my laptop writing this, with the other computer next to me and the very problem on the screen, staring me in the face. All I can think of when i turn my head to it is why. Why me u damn computer?! Deep breath. Now to explain what's going on. It's been about a week since deciding to delve into the world of linux. I'd just dug out an old PC ('97) lying around in the garage and since not being used decided to make some use of it and my free time. I researched all I could about the different distros available, and was basically looking for one from which i could actually learn linux, but at the same time won't totally throw me in the deep end. Although the website did put me off it a little, i chose Slackware, and downloaded the 4 iso images using bittorrent. Fiddling around with the PC i discovered that the CD-ROM wouldn't load upon boot up, so i created a BOOT DISK using the bare.i and 2 ROOT DISKS with install.1 and install.2 respectively (this is according to SW 10.0). Inserted the BOOT DISK, load up bare.i, then insert the 2 ROOT DISKS. I log-in as root, and then from this point i'm meant to use FDISK to partition my HDD right? so i type the following:

fdisk /dev/hda, and on pressing ENTER i get:
fdisk.bin: No such file or directory

What's going on?? why can't i load up fdisk? am i doing something wrong?
PLEASE HELP!! I'm beginning to think i should try another distro, but for some reason i want to stick with SW.

BTW, I have 2 HDDs in my comp, one 40GB which from updating the bios can now use the full 40gigs (old m/b, GA-686LX3), and another 9GB HDD. I've tested on both seperately, and on both accounts the same happens.

Could it be the software i downloaded? I searched for ages on the net but unfortunately this problem seems to not exist and is only happening to me!

Also one more thing. When i load up ROOT DISK install.2, I look at the screen and can see alot of the word 'error' (eg I/O error). Is this meant to load up like this?

Sorry for my lack of knowledge. Hopefully there is someone out there that can help me, and make me into a very happy SW user!


snake_eye

Try
cfdisk /dev/hda

and see if that command is available.

If you're seeing lots of input/output errors, you may be using a bad floppy. The first thing I'd do before I panicked anymore would be to try some fresh floppies.

--Shade

I'm gonna take a guess here... I don't think the boot disks included the /bin utils (like, all of the standard executables). It looks like they only included the basic boot software, so...

Mount the cd-rom. To do this, you'll enter something to the effect of
mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom

then cd /mnt/cdrom and look around for a /bin directory.

This of course depends on what your cd-rom is listed as. However, once you've got the cd mounted, you can go ahead and run fdisk off of it. I'm a n00b, so I probably got something wrong here. Anyone more experienced wanna take a stab at it?

Good luck!

SOLVED IT!!! YESSS!!

The problem was the damn install.2 disk. Remember I said i saw alot of errors while install.2 was loaded? Well I made myself a new copy on the same disk and this time it worked! As simple as that!

thanks for your help guys.

Sometimes I hate computers...


snake_eye