"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Answer Guy

By James T. Dennis, answerguy@ssc.com
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

Partition your HD before you try to use it.

From Adam Ray on 23 Sep 1998

What's this about non-partitioned? You have to partition the drive before you can use it as your root.

Yep!

I have an adaptec 1505 SCSI card (no bios). an a seagate 1gig SCSI HDD. I want to install linux to boot from a floppy, and then use the SCSI drive as the root. But when i put in the rescue disk and at the boot: prompt type "rescue aha152x=0x340,12,7,1" it finds the card then finds the drive, but it comes up with an error that the kernel can't load at something like "10:" i'm not sure if that is the exact number, but i' mnot a that machine right now. I was wondering if you could give me, or know where there is a blow-by-blow installationi tutorial for non-partitioned SCSI drives.

If you read the Linux Installation and Getting Started (LIGS) Guide from the LDP --- the Linux Documentation Project --- you'll find a fairly extensive discussion of 'fdisk' and 'Lilo'. LDP is at http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP and many mirror sites.

There are also man pages on 'fdisk' and Lilo --- and there is a pretty good Lilo guide (usually included as a .dvi or .ps PostScript file to provide the diagrams and illustrations).

I realize that you won't be using Lilo in the usual way to load this copy of Linux (since a boot sector installed on your SCSI hard drive will never be reached by your BIOS's boot up sequence). However, reading the docs about the way its "usually" done can help understand the exception cases in any event.

Another problem I see in this case is that you're trying to "rescue" a "new installation." That doesn't work. You use a "rescue" diskette to fix an damaged or misconfigured existing installation. To install a new system use an "installation" diskette. Most of the friendly installation programs out there these days (Red Hat, S.u.S.E. etc) will not handle your situation particuarly well. They should install just fine --- but they may not offer the option to "boot from diskette."

So, use their installation to get to the point where it wants to run Lilo --- and let it do that even (no harm in it, even though you don't have a BIOS that will call on it). Then use the rescue diskette to boot into the running system and read the BootDisk HOWTO for advice on creating a custom boot diskette.

You could also use Tom's Root/Boot (tomsrtbt at http://www.toms.net/rb) as the basis for your custom boot disk. It is the easiest single diskette distribution to customize (of the ones that I've tried).

please E-mail me

Thanks,
Adam

Copyright © 1998, James T. Dennis
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 33 October 1998

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