Hang on initializing swap partition
Group, does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can get Debian installed on this laptop?
In advance, I really do appreciate the help.
Jim
----- Forwarded by Jim Rice on 05/31/2002 08:23 AM -----
Wouter,
Thank you for your help and for pointing out the other consoles. They were extremely helpful.
I let it run all night. No luck. In checking out /var/log/messages, it seems that the process hung shortly after it started. There was no further activity logged.
Prior to this attempt, I did do a low-level test of the hard drive with a utility from IBM. The utility did not report any errors, so I figure the drive is ok.
I appreciate your help and will follow this up on the list.
Thanks,
Jim
On Thu, 30 May 2002 jim.rice@akuratus.com wrote:
> Thank you for the rapid response.
>
> So far it has been going for over an hour. It is only a 2 GB drive.
If it's still going right now, you can be sure it's hanging. There will
probably be some useful information on the other virtual consoles; use
'Alt-F3' and/or 'Alt-F4' to check that information.
If that doesn't help you, do follow up on this to the debian-boot
mailinglist. I'm not too experienced with boot-floppies...
For comparison, on my Pentium 166 with a 1.6GB hard disk, it took about
five to ten minutes, IIRC, to do the bad blocks test of 80MB. 256MB
shouldn't take over an hour.
--
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be
"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
-- From the movie "Antitrust"
On Thu, 30 May 2002 jim.rice@akuratus.com wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Please pardon if this has been asked before. I have searched but just not
> found the answer.
>
> I am trying to install a vanilla instance of potato on an old Gateway
> Laptop (P150 MMX) and a 2 Gig HD. The machine had a previous RedHat 5.2
> installation.
>
> I boot with a floppy created with the sbm.bin file and then have it boot
> Debian from the CD-ROM. I step through the configuration steps and have
> set up a completely new partition table.
>
> 10 M to boot
> 256 M to swap (only 128 MB RAM)
> 1903 M to /
>
> I save the partition table and then move to initialize the swap partition.
> I tell the install to check for bad blocks and proceed. Immediately
> thereafter the screen displays a message "Initializing swap partition . .
> ." and appears to freeze.
>
> Any suggestions?
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