Blank HD Installation

[BillinBoston]

Hi,
Our company gave away all its old computers, and I came home with a Dell Pentium II with 350 MHz and 128M of Ram. The hard disc was wiped clean...no Windows system, no partitions, no Fat32, no nothing...and so I thought it would be a perfect time to set up a Windows-free Linux machine.
I am running Knoppix 3.8.1 from the CD drive right now. The knoppix-installer looks straightforward enough, BUT...I have no idea how large the hard disc is, and before trying anything I thought I'd better ask, Is there a way to find out? If it's under 2 Gigs should I attempt the Poor Man's Installation? In which case I may need someone to hold my hand, because I am a complete newbie at this.
Thanks for your advice! --Bill

[tdjokic]

Click on terminal icon, then type su+Enter, then cfdisk and try to make new partition, you will see the size of hdd.

[BillinBoston]

Click on terminal icon, then type su+Enter, then cfdisk and try to make new partition, you will see the size of hdd.

Thanks for the reply. I did that and got

FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive

Now what? I think Knoppix can at least see the hdd, because the installer was able to detect that there was no partition. --Bill

[tdjokic]

I don't know what to say. Can you try with some Windows boot floppy or CD to make same test?

[BillinBoston]

I don't know what to say. Can you try with some Windows boot floppy or CD to make same test?

I have a Windows 98 emergency floppy. When I boot up with it, the A:\ prompt blinks mindlessly. Maybe there's a DOS command that can communicate with the HDD and tell me its size?

The reason I haven't blundered ahead and just run the knoppix-installer is that I heard partitions can be hard to get rid of, and I didn't want to screw up the hard disc permanently.

--Bill

[tdjokic]

fdisk ?

[ChuckinColorado]

Bill:

CHKDSK is the command line if the hard disk is formatted. fdisk will let for format the disk (and will let you erase any linux partitions later) but I don't know that it shows the hard drive size unless you partition the hard drive.

But why bother. During boot enter the Dell motherboard setup (F2 on my Dells). This should tell you the hard drive size.

Of just go for it. As I said, fdisk can be used to remove any partitions that you create, even linux partitions. And if you don't have fdisk on your emergency boot disk, you can boot using the Win98 CD, choose boot with CD support (not install) and it will put fdisk on the ram disk it creates.

chuck

[ottosykora]

boot with the w98 floppy

enter fdisk at the promt
follow the dialog to produce at least one primary partition which might be maximum 2gb of size.
if it does create it, you can make the a extended partition unig the max possible size and some logical drive in it as the dialog says.
it report you then what size the partitions became.

remamber: those parts are still not formated to anything unless you use someting like format from the w98 floppy.

otherwise: open the comp and try to take out the hd and read what it says on the top of it.

[BillinBoston]

> boot with the w98 floppy
...snip...

Thank you, thanks to all.

I'm making progress, but there is always some darn thing...which I'll ask about in an new thread

--Bill