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Thread: How to install to already partitioned HD

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
    By the way, I just want to install to HD simply because it will work slightly faster and the CD-ROM drive in the Pentium machine is quite noisy!
    You'll actually learn a lot in doing a Debian install and working with it. The new install is pretty clean, should not be any harder than installing Knoppix. You will have to install the appliactions that you want (ones included with Knoppix or others), but with a network connection this is as easy as typing "apt-get package-name", and it lets you have exactly the packages that you want and wil use. Of course it will be faster than running from CD-ROM, you can update packages as needed, and your CD drive will be available for use under Debian, amoung other benefits.
    ---
    Verifying of md5 checksum and burning a CD at slow speed are important.

  2. #12
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    Harry, I just tried to install Debian on my HD this evening but was stymied!

    Before I booted the Debian CD, I actually backed-up my personal data, re-installed Win98 and clean & defrag the C drive (there is still 1 fragmented file), so I have at the begining at least 2.7G free space out of 4G.

    I followed the Debian install o.k., just a little hitch in that I had to manually config my DHCP.

    When I came to the screen titled 'Partition disks', there are three methods listed:
    1. Use the largest continuous free space
    2. Erase entire disk: IDE1 master (hda) - 4.3GB Maxtor 90432D3
    3. Manually edit partition table.

    I chosen #1, but the dialogue came back with this message:
    "Failed to partitioned the selected disk" and it gave some possible reasons for this: "selected disk or free space is too small to be automatically partitioned."

    I clicked on <continue> and was presented with an overview of current config partitions and mount points and some selections:

    "-config software RAID
    -config the logical volume manager
    -guide partition
    -help on partition

    IDE1 master (hda) - 4.3GB Maxtor...
    #1 primary 4.3GB fat32
    pri/log 8.2MB free space"

    So where did I went wrong? By the way, I used the CD disk that came with the Debian book (Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 bible) that I borrowed from someone, but that person is away, so I couldnt get help from him at the moment.

  3. #13
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    Defragging the Win98 partition is meaningless as far as installing Linux to the rest of the free space outside of the C partition is concerned. From what you posted it seem that the Debian installed does not think that there is free space.

    You never did say what you did to get rid of that D "primary partition". If you didn't get rid of it this is the result that I would expect. Please tell us how you got rid of D to freee up that space for a Linux and a Linux Swap partition and post the current information from doing a "4" in windows Fdisk.
    ---
    Verifying of md5 checksum and burning a CD at slow speed are important.

  4. #14
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    O.k. I actually took back my machine to the shop where it originally came from, and had it restored by using the boot floppy - it had apparently been partitioned by using FIPs (see, e.g. http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickr...disk.html#fips).

    With regards to no. 4 of FDISK, this is the info displayed:

    Part-----Status------Type-------MB---Sys
    C: 1-----A---------PRI DOS---4110---FAT32

  5. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
    O.k. I actually took back my machine to the shop where it originally came from, ..... this is the info displayed:
    Part-----Status------Type-------MB---Sys
    C: 1-----A---------PRI DOS---4110---FAT32
    Well, that change be the shop is your problem. You now have a C partition that takes up all of the 4 gig hard drive and no space for Linux partition.

    I sure hope that the shop didn't charge you anything to do this (although I suspect that they did). At the current price of 25 to 33 cents a gig of mid-size IDE hard drives you could have bought a lot of extra hard drive for not much money, which would have been far better than paying for mucking with the current hard drive.

    I had never heard of FIPS. Thanks for the link. Following another link in the link that you provided reveals that FIPS is a RED HAT tool for shrinking a FAT partition. That does not explain in any way why you had 2 primary partitions on your 4 gig hard disk.

    There are tools that will try to shrink a FAT partition. FIPS is apparently one. Partition Magic (not free) is another. All such tools seem to advise strongly that you have a good backup of the hard disk before trying to use them. If you used FIPS or any such tool to shrink the C partition back to where it was then you would have the free space that we spoke of in previous posts.

    You could also considering adding another hard drive to this system. Be advised that it is pretty old and buying new hardware might not make sense. And it is old enouh that it will have a limit on how large of a hard disk you can install. That limit will certainly be no larger than 120 gig hard drives, but might be as small as 8 gig hard drives. If you have old drives you might want to add one in, or you might find friends will small old drives that they would be glad to give you.

    I hope you now see why Debian didn't find free disk space now, if not ask again and I'll try to make it more clear. Your probelm was likely that you didn't communicate with the shop that you were planning to install Debian on the space where D was and that they removed D (which really really never should have been there) but then decided to give you that space back, and worse they did it by resizing your C partition with some software like Partition MAgic rather than just making an extended patrtition and putting a D logical drive in it (if they had done it that way I could easily talk you through removing D again, but ....).

  6. #16
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    O.k. Harry

    Actually, the guy didnt charge me anything. It was an old machine and I got it for a bargain for almost nothing.

    The C drive holds Win98 and there is about 2.7G of free space on that drive.

    So what you're actually saying is that I should partition the 'C' drive before I boot the Debian CD? I read the FIPs link you provided, would it works for the Debian installer? Say I use FIPs as described in the Red Hat installation doc, partition C by resizing the drive, rebooting and then boot from Debian CD?

  7. #17
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    Free space on a C partition is of no use to Debian (or just about any other Linux install). It needs to be free space on the hard drive that is outside any existing Windows partition. This wouild have been the case if the old D partition had been removed with Ranish or any other partition tool that would do it and if C had been left at it's original size. But Fdisk could apparently not delete D because it was another primary partition on the same drive. And whatever the shop did they enlarged C in the process.

    FIPS is not a part of the Debian install process. As you pointed out, the Debian install can not preceed because there is not free space on the disk.

    If you have some way to run FIPS it might work, I have never used it, don't have any way to support it, and can only caution you that if you use anything that can supposedly shrink back the C partition to where it was to have very good backups of anythig that you consider important before you try. Or ask the shop if they have any old 2 to 5 gig hard drive that thay want to sell you dirt cheap and add a second drive (I would not expect to pay more than $10 for a 5 gig drive, maybe a lot less). Ask them to jumper it as a slave drive if they do.
    ---
    Verifying of md5 checksum and burning a CD at slow speed are important.

  8. #18
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    O.k. Harry! I spend all night reading the online instructions on FIPs (there seem to be conflicting instructions among some of them) and installing a dual-boot system. Apparently it works - I got much the same partitions table as before I took the PC back to the shop.

    FYI:
    Go to the documentation for FIPs v2.0, first read the FIP.DOC, download the FIPs v2.0 zip file, then make a boot floppy by copying the FIPs files RESTORRB.EXE, FIPS.EXE and ERRORS.TXT to the disk. When you start FIPSs, you will be given the opportunity to write backup copies of your root & boot sector to a file on drive A: called ROOTBOOT.00x (x=0,1,...etc). Boot from the FIPs floppy and do the resizing & partition creation as described in FIP.DOC.

    I resized the C drive and created a second primary DOS partition of about 1.7G. Then I rebooted the PC before booting from the Debian CD (the one that came with the book - Debian 3.1 "Sarge").

    After walking thru the installion and briefly config DCHP manually (by entering IP, netmask, gateway etc), I then came upon the partition options. I first deleted the second primary partition that I created with FIPs and created the 1.7G free space for debian-linux install, from there let the installer autoconfig for three linux partitions:

    #2---primary---649.8MB---ext3---/
    #5---primary---106.9MB---swap---swap
    #5---logical---1.0GB---ext3---/home

    The first partition is #1 primary consisting of 2.5GB fat32 where Win98 lives. After confirming and writing the partition, I then when prompted, installed the debian GRUB, confirm and ended this installation. Rebooting into the GRUB went o.k. - there are four boot options: debian, debian-safe, Win98 and other system. Debian and Win98 worked o.k. In linux, I'm in debian shell prompt.

    When I installed the software, I chosen the cdrom as the method which apt access the debian archive. There is an option for network resource -- how do I get that option? What about the GNOME desktop? Most importantly of all I have no idea if the network DCHP config o.k. The debian shell, of course I will work with but later on.

    By the way, the NIC (network interface card) was switched off - I had to enabled it from the BIOS setting, so now I have inaddition to this network adapter scientific-atlanta WebSTAR 2000 series cable modem, I also have 3Com Fast Etherlink XL 10/100MB Ethenet NIC.

  9. #19
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    Maybe I need to get some sleep, or some coffee, I'm having rouble following what you have said. Here are just a few observation that I can throw out now:

    I'm not at all sure what you did with FIPS, but it does sound like you make space for an install. I'll assume that that is correct and not further concern myself with that.

    You talk about installing Debain Sarge. I've repeatedly suggested Etch. Etch is often also called "testing", but it is pretty stable and I see no reason to use Sarge, which has a somewhat more difficult install process (they learned a lot by the time etch was made and it shows). Since Knoppix contains a lot of Etch code I believe that Etch should be considered at least as stable as Knoppix. While you are certainly free to install Sarge, and your hardware is old enough that you are not likely to come across things that were not supported in Sarge but are in Etch, my recent insall experience is with Etch, it's been well over a year since I last installed Sarge and I don't trust my memory on it.

    When installing Debina Etch there comes a question for the type of install that you are doing, including options for things like file server or mail server or (if I remember correctly) print server and one of these choices is Desktop Install. That is the option that you take to get Gnome during the install. There are also choices like this in Sarge; I'm sure because when I installed Sarge I got the GUI at install time, but the wording might be different or it might have been presented in a different way, I somewhat recall a check list of things I wanted but it's been too long ago for me to be sure enough to give ohers advice. You very likely can apt-get gnome or kde now (if you apt-get kde you bring in a lot of extra kde applications with it, I think you need to apt-get something else like kde-default to get just the core GUI) . But I have not installed gnome this way and don't know if any extra setup will be needed later; I've always done it by selecting desktop install during the install process.

    As to your NICs, I'm completely confused. It sounds like you might have an on-board NIC that you are enabling or disabling in the BIOS. But you system is so old that this understand does not really seem likely. And you seem to call one of the "network adapters" a "scientific-atlanta WebSTAR 2000 series cable modem". A cable modem is not a network adapter. It is the thing that you plug attach the network adapter (NIC) to to get to the outside world. I can tell you two things here:

    • 1) I always use a router when connecting to the Internet. I consider them critically important in providing hardware firewall protection. And they will make most other network connection problems "go away". These have become extremely cheap, you can get an 802.g wireless/wired router for $9.99 after rebate this week at CompUSA and you can get a Linksys 802.b router for $1.99 after rebate today and Monday.

      2) Debian (both Etch and Sarge) has always identified my NICs properly at install time and uses DHCP with the router to get all of the needed setup information. I know a net-install with DSL (I have DSL) would be difficult if not imposiable without a router, but I expect that it would work OK with a cable modem, but some cable companies play games with MAC addresses and such, and a router would resolve this issue for you.

  10. #20
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    Sorry to get some thing a lil' confusing for you Harry!

    Yes, there is no need to be bother about disk partition & FIPs. I have Debian 3.1 "sarge" installed in my HD and I can dual-boot into either Win98 or Debian-Linux. Maybe I should have install Debian-Etch as you mentioned. Just in case, how do I actually remove the Debian-Sarge on my HD, just so that I could install Debian-Etch?

    I do not recall coming up to the 'desktop install' (i.e. gnome) during the Debian-sarge install process. Anyway, I tried the apt-get in the debian [root] shell by typing:

    atp-get install gnome

    after pressing <enter>, I get this:

    "package gnome is not available, but is referred to by another package. this may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source
    E: package gnome has no installation candidate."

    Re: NIC - in the Win98 control panel, system properties, device manager, there is device called "network adapters" and I have these three listed: the Ethenet NIC, Scientifc-Atlanta cable modem and dial-up adapter. The cable modem has both ethenet and USB ports, see WebSTAR DPC2100 Cable Modem Features. My modem is similiar, it is EPC2100 series.

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