Nataki
08-06-2004, 09:36 AM
Okay, here's the deal. I'm trying to install linux on my oldest comp. It's not pretty.
It's a p1, 133 mhz processor with only 64 megs of ram. It has two hard disks, the master being 5.5 gb and the slave being 1.6 gb. I have no intentions of using kde on this thing. All I need is to install it to the hard drive, and have it able to boot up into the bash shell. I have had so many problems with this, it's not even funny.
My first problem came up when I was trying to partiton the drives. I've come to the conclusion it's not possible to do in the bash shell. Originally, I ran "knoppix-installer" and just tried to partition from that. Unfortanately, it wouldn't let me open either of my two drives to partition. I believe the error message was something along the lines of "could not write to disk - drive opened read only." Okay, so I figured this was no big deal. I mounted both of the disks as read-write and tried again, same error. I did all sorts of variations of mounting and unmounting, and eventually I stopped running the installer at all and just going straight to "cfdisk." Never worked. In the end, I booted up into kde. About an half an hour later, I was at the desktop. I ran the installer from there, and for some reason, it let me partition the drives (in kde, knoppix-installer uses qtparted not "cfdisk", which probably has something to do with it right there...) Anyway, I finally got my drives partitioned.
hda1 ext2 5 gigs
hda2 swap .5 gigs
hdb wasn't partitioned because qtparted was being real tempermental and wouldn't let me do anything, but I doubt I'll be needing that much hard drive space anyway, since I'm running this text only. Also, I made the swap file only 500 mb because I figured, there is NO way I would ever need a full gig of memory running in just text.
7 hours later, the installation was completed. LILO was installed to the mbr and it CLAIMED that it was installed succesfully. I made a boot disk as well. I restarted and was happy to see LILO smiling back at me with the three kernel options (knoppix, 2.4, or 2.6). However, no matter which one I choose, Knoppix will not boot. It appears to load everything right, and is going through the normal boot messages, when suddenly, it says:
Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init
And that's where it hangs. Ctrl+C does nothing, I can't switch to other shells using alt+f#, and it just isn't good in general. Now if I could at least get into a bash shell to fix this, I wouldn't be quite so frustrated, but the problem is, I can't even make it to a shell. And if I boot up to a cd, I can't change settings on the hd because everything runs from the cd. That probably made no sense at all. For instance, if I change lilo.conf on the hd, I have to run lilo. Problem is, LILO realizes that knoppix is the current root partition, and instead of trying to recognize lilo.conf on my hard disk, it goes and looks at the knoppix one instead. I'm really out of ideas here, so anything you can suggest would be appreciated. Thanks.
P.S. I'm installing Knoppix 3.4
It's a p1, 133 mhz processor with only 64 megs of ram. It has two hard disks, the master being 5.5 gb and the slave being 1.6 gb. I have no intentions of using kde on this thing. All I need is to install it to the hard drive, and have it able to boot up into the bash shell. I have had so many problems with this, it's not even funny.
My first problem came up when I was trying to partiton the drives. I've come to the conclusion it's not possible to do in the bash shell. Originally, I ran "knoppix-installer" and just tried to partition from that. Unfortanately, it wouldn't let me open either of my two drives to partition. I believe the error message was something along the lines of "could not write to disk - drive opened read only." Okay, so I figured this was no big deal. I mounted both of the disks as read-write and tried again, same error. I did all sorts of variations of mounting and unmounting, and eventually I stopped running the installer at all and just going straight to "cfdisk." Never worked. In the end, I booted up into kde. About an half an hour later, I was at the desktop. I ran the installer from there, and for some reason, it let me partition the drives (in kde, knoppix-installer uses qtparted not "cfdisk", which probably has something to do with it right there...) Anyway, I finally got my drives partitioned.
hda1 ext2 5 gigs
hda2 swap .5 gigs
hdb wasn't partitioned because qtparted was being real tempermental and wouldn't let me do anything, but I doubt I'll be needing that much hard drive space anyway, since I'm running this text only. Also, I made the swap file only 500 mb because I figured, there is NO way I would ever need a full gig of memory running in just text.
7 hours later, the installation was completed. LILO was installed to the mbr and it CLAIMED that it was installed succesfully. I made a boot disk as well. I restarted and was happy to see LILO smiling back at me with the three kernel options (knoppix, 2.4, or 2.6). However, no matter which one I choose, Knoppix will not boot. It appears to load everything right, and is going through the normal boot messages, when suddenly, it says:
Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init
And that's where it hangs. Ctrl+C does nothing, I can't switch to other shells using alt+f#, and it just isn't good in general. Now if I could at least get into a bash shell to fix this, I wouldn't be quite so frustrated, but the problem is, I can't even make it to a shell. And if I boot up to a cd, I can't change settings on the hd because everything runs from the cd. That probably made no sense at all. For instance, if I change lilo.conf on the hd, I have to run lilo. Problem is, LILO realizes that knoppix is the current root partition, and instead of trying to recognize lilo.conf on my hard disk, it goes and looks at the knoppix one instead. I'm really out of ideas here, so anything you can suggest would be appreciated. Thanks.
P.S. I'm installing Knoppix 3.4