Mandrake to Knoppix PartitionProblems (I think)

[fullerton]

I launch the knx-install script and choose my harddrive and it launches CFDISK then displays at the bottom of the screen:

FATAL ERROR - connaot read Disk Drive

I press on and it asks if I want to swap partitions I say yes and it says:

No Swap Partion could be found on the disk the script will be terminated.

and that's how it ends.

I recently got rid of windows for Mandrake linux after trying out Linux with knoppix and loving it. Unfortuantely Mandrake isn't detecting some of my hardware and beyond that I just like Debian/Koppix better...it's what i started with in my quest to be M$ free.

I have a tiny harddrive, so when i switched to mandarke I had to erase my HD...I'm willing to do this again to switch to knoppix, but since I'm a compu-moron I'm not sure how to do this.

I'm a newbie...go easy on me

Thanks in advance, your help is really appreciated.

[CrashedAgain]

It's really suprising how we often walk down exactly the same path! I also was trying to get away from M$ & could not get Mandrake to work satisfactorily so switched to Knoppix.
First, what is on the HD now? Does it have a valid filesystem on it that Knoppix is unable to read when running from the CD? If so, you probably will have to reformat the HD.
How big is 'tiny'? Knoppix needs 2.3 Gig or it refuses to attempt a HD install. Even with 2.3 Gig it will doesn't have enough room to install OpenOffice. I had to uninstall a bunch of games & other stuff I wasn't going to use to make room for OpenOffice. (use KDE's Kpackage)
If you had Mandrake on this system it should have created a swap file. If you don't have a swap file & you tell the hdinstall you want to use one, it won't create one, it will just terminate the install, so if you want to use a swap file you will have to create it first.
If you have to erase your HD, the easiest way is probably to use a Windows boot disk & windows fdisk. You should be able to do it from Knoppix running from CD but you will probably have to remount the HD as a read/write drive since I think Knoppix mounts these as read only by default. (Somebody may correct me on this but that's the way it seems to work for me). Don't forget, after setting up the partitions you have to format the drives before you can use them. You can format them as windows drives (vfat) then change them to linux ext2 filesystems from cfisk during the hdinstall.
Are you trying to set up as a dual boot- Windows & Linux? If you are going to try to set up a dual system, plan on leaving space on the windows partition for your data. You will want your data on the windows part since Linux can read windows stuff but not visa versa.
Minimum for a dual boot system would probably be about 5 Gig...2.5 for Knoppix, 2 for Windows & the rest for swap. Doesn't leave much for data but it will work.

[CrashedAgain]

On reading some other posts I was reminded of one other 'quirk'. Mandrake always seems to leave a chunk of 'unuseable' space when it makes partitions. Perhaps this is what cfdisk is seeing when it is finding stuff it is unable to read. You MAY be able to straighten things out by just setting up the partitions as you want them with cfdisk during the hdinstall.

[fullerton]

Tiny is six gigs and i don't want to have both windows in Knoppix...just knoppix. I don't have enough room for both (I had to remove windows to get mandrake). Since I don't have windows, i can't use it to erase my HD...is there a way to do it with linux, I mean I'm sure there is but I'm kind of slow (mentally) and If it's really complex, I probably won't be able to do it.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR RESPONDING

between my hardware problems with mandrake and this I've been soo frustrated.



...oh hey, (from re reading your post) it looks like what I need to do is start a swap file..., how do I do that?

[CrashedAgain]

You should be able to create a new partition from cfdisk when it appears during the startup script. See the 'help' file in cfdisk or the man page. You will probably have to remount the HD for read/write since I think Knoppix mounts these read only when running from the CD.
You could also boot from a Windows floppy or startup CD then use fdisk to partition the HD.
Or, just select 'No Swap File' during the startup script to see if Knoppix is going to install OK.
My laptop also has only 6Gig HD, I have it set up 1.8G for WindowsME, 2.3 for Knoppix & the rest for Data (vfat file system so Data is accesssible to both). I find this is enough but it depends on what sort of data you are doing. Most of my data is text or CAD so the files are not too big, video & sound take a lot more space. The Windows partition is not really big enough, but I can get around that by putting windows apps on the Data partition.
I started using a separate drive for data after I had a Windows crash & lost some stuff when I had to reinstalll Win.