I was mistyping the command as activate /dev/hda1 when it was supposed to be actvate /dev/hda 1

But I have another snag. formating hda2 gives me the error bad number of fats : 32

thanks

If I could I have a few questions on this procedure.

I am also trying to get a HD install on a very small 1.2g laptop
I think I have my partitins set up properly
I have a fat-16 for boot but the only thing i could find was win95 fat-32 for hda2 and type 83 for hda4. I am hoping this is correct

I rebooted after this and proceeded with the "dd" commands but I am not sure they are working dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 reports 'no space left on device" but it says it wrote to it (4M) now I copy the boot image over and it seems to do what it's supposed to then I get to activate /dev/hda1 and it says no active partition found on /dev/hda1 and I don't now whether to proceed or not. HDA1 is set to be a boot device.

thanks



[quote="Dave_Bechtel"]--You could partition the drive like so:
o hda1 = 1 cylinder (4-8MB) FAT16 (boot)
o hda2 = 701+MB FAT32 (has to be a little more than 700MB for filesystem overhead)
o hda3 = 128MB swap (type 82)
o hda4 = ext3 (rest of drive) - should be 200MB or more, for persistent home

--Then boot knoppix cd in runlevel 2 ' knoppix 2 '
o ' dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 ' == Clear partition
o ' dd if=/cdrom/KNOPPIX/boot.img of=/dev/hda1 ' == Dump boot floppy image to partition
o ' activate /dev/hda 1 ' == Boot from boot floppy image

--Poor man's install on hda2:
o ' mkdosfs -c -F 32 -v /dev/hda2 ' == Format
o ' mkdir /mnt/hda2 '
o ' mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2 -onoatime,rw ' == Mount Fat32
o ' mkdir /mnt/hda2/knoppix '
o ' cp /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX /mnt/hda2/knoppix ' == Copy big knoppix file from CD to msdos partition

--Swap:
o ' mkswap -c /dev/hda3 '
o ' swapon /dev/hda3 ' == Format and turn on swap

--Persistent home setup:
o ' mkfs.ext3 -c -j -m1 -v /dev/hda4 '

--Using persistent home is beyond the scope of this document. (I've never used it.) Just search the board for it.

--Now the boot image on hda1 can be mounted, and you can modify the syslinux.cfg file for whatever cheatcodes you normally use on boot. Once the active flag is set on partition 1, it will reboot from HD into poor man's install AND you have space left over for PH. Such is the beauty of Knoppix.