Hi,

I've tried low level format, but it crashed at some point using MicroScope utilities. I then tried fdisk to set primary and format c: booting from a recovery diskette. I got following dubious message:

Formatting 6,149.85M
Trying to recover allocationunit 1,564,562
Not ready
Format terminated

So I ran extensive test of the hard drive. MicroScope gives interesting parameters:

Win9x-32 partition type
status bootable
starting head 1
starting sector 1
starting cyl. 0
ending head 254
ending sector 63
ending cylinder 783
start abs sec 63
number of sectors 12594897
boot signature 55AA

Also, there are two types of params BIOS and LBA which are off by 1 (BIOS counts 785 cylinders, LBA counts 784 cylinders). I duno whether 783 cylinders is better than 784 or 785? Running fixed disk LBA read/write test I found

drive 0 cylinder 780
head 181 sector 31
pass 0 error code 10
"uncorrectable crc/ecc errror"

and the error log was full of msgs of this type on cylinder 780. I gather that the drive is defective from cylinder 780. There are options available to map the drive to skip the bad section, but I think it's better to abandon the drive at this point than pull out hairs when it goes belly up later.

At this point, I went ahead with hd install to test the behavior of Knoppix on a defective drive with mixed results.

Booted from CD-ROM an from root shell I did
mkswap /dev/hda1 and swapon -a to activate. It did use the whole drive at this point. Using cfsk I've created two partitions /dev/hda1 as swap and remainder /dev/hda2 as reiserfs. I think it would be advisable to place a limit on the /root partition as a precaution, and either add another extended /dev/hda4 or add /var for print-spooler and email-spooler. Launching the script knx-hdinstall asked me again to do this part. Then approx 40% into copying files, I've got an i/o error from which the script recovered. Upon completion, I've selected to use LILO in the MBR, but this did not seem to work. I think it's due to user error, the partitions are not kosher. Here's the output from /etc/fstab:

# filesystem mountpoint type options dump pass
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs defaults 0 1
/dev/hda1 none swap sw 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
# partitions found by Knoppix
#/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 auto noauto,users,exec 0 0

That extra #/dev/hda1 is confusing.

Also, here's the /etc/lilo.conf file:

vga=791
lba32
root=/dev/hda2
install=/boot/boot-menu.b
map=/boot/map
delay=20
append="hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi
apm=power-off nomce"
default=Linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20=xfs
label=Linux
initrd=/boot/initrd.gz
read-only

image=/vmlinuz.old
label=LinuxOLD
read-only
optional

I've created a boot disk during hd install and can only boot from the floppy. The MBR needs to be ammended. All sugestions will be sincerely appreciated.

Reagards,

Joseph Schiller