Installing Knoppix on hard drive

[sridharb]

Hi,

I am trying knoppix for the first time. I like the way it configured
itself on my machine. This made me want to install it to the hard
drive.

I have an old AMD Duron 800 with SIS 630. When booting from the CD, I
had to specify the xvrefresh=75 and screen=1024x768 for it to come up
properly, otherwise it failed (screen was not visible).

Also because of the shared memory for the video card, I need to
specify the mem= on the boot options as well.

After I got through these problems, the CD-based session worked well.

I currently have a dual boot between Debian Woody and Windows XP. I
want to replace Debian with Knoppix. knx-hdinstall seems to use only
two partitions (swap and root), so the partitioning scheme that I had
created for debian could not be used. I just chose one of the large
partitions for the root filesystem and proceeded.

I think lilo had problems, but I couldn't read any error messages as
the hdinstaller went to the next step immediately.

Upon booting, I still saw the "old" lilo screen from my debian
installation. Needless to say, choosing one of those options failed
miserably.

I rebooted with the knoppix CD and tried to run lilo by hand. I
mounted the filesystem that I had installed as the root filesystem
through "mount -o rw /mnt/hdb6". Then I did "cd /mnt/hdb6; chroot ."
All this seemed to work fine. I could see the /etc/lilo.conf (in
/mnt/hdb6) having the boot device as /dev/hdb. I tried running lilo -
it says "Fatal: cannot open /dev/hdb". I tried changing it to /dev/hda
with the same results.

What can I do to proceed?

Thanks,
Sridhar

[sridharb]

I rebooted with the knoppix CD and tried to run lilo by hand. I
mounted the filesystem that I had installed as the root filesystem
through "mount -o rw /mnt/hdb6". Then I did "cd /mnt/hdb6; chroot ."
All this seemed to work fine. I could see the /etc/lilo.conf (in
/mnt/hdb6) having the boot device as /dev/hdb. I tried running lilo -
it says "Fatal: cannot open /dev/hdb". I tried changing it to /dev/hda
with the same results.

The problem was that chroot didn't have access to the same mounts that the CD did.

So, here's how I solved this problem:

I changed the boot device to /dev/hda as mentioned above.

Then I moved /boot to /boot.old, ln -s /mnt/hdb6/boot /boot

lilo -C /mnt/hdb6/etc/lilo.conf then works fine.

Note: if you have to add any kernel parameters to the boot, you should edit lilo.conf before running lilo.

Sridhar

[rickenbacherus]

Glad you got it working. But actually all you had to do was boot your new install with the boot floppy and run LILO. Oh and BTW - although Knoppix won't install to your original partition scheme it certainly can be made to use it after installation. Simply copy the respective directories to their new partitons, make sure everything points to the new locations and you're set.