Re: install troubles
On Sat, 21 Dec 1996, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> Hey there folks. New (potential) Linux user here; having trouble getting
> Debian to install on my dinosaur system, and haven't been able to locate
> anything in the troubleshooting guides or user docs to help out.
> Upon booting from the Rescue floppy, everything works fine for a while
> (lots of failed to locate cdrom messages and such) until it gets to:
>
> Partition check:
> hda: hda1
> RAMDisk: Compressed image found at block 0
> Couldn't get a free page...
> out of memoryVFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem)
> init: cache '/etc/ld.so.cache' is corrupt
>
> At which point it goes no further. The machine is a 486-33 (intel) with
> 120meg IDE drive (currently formated for dos 5.0), SVGA, a few other
> random periphrials. The boot disk is a 3 1/2 floppy and I've tried making
> several just in case it was a data error of some sort. My first guess is
> that it's trying to make a RAM disk and then running out of memory in my
> paltry 4 megs of ram; however I was unable to locate any boot options for
> disabling this, and I have no idea if that's really it being that I know
> next to nothing about Linux. It is version 2.0.27 of Debian. Any
> thoughts or perhaps pointers to documentation which adresses this
> appreciated.
>
Adam,
I don't know how much help this will be but since I didn't see any replys
to your message, here goes... Back a while ago, I loaded Debian 1.1 on an
aging 386 with with 4 Meg of RAM (seems like ages ago, but it was less
than 6 months...), and one of the first things I had to do was configure a
swap partition. If I remember correctly, after loading the boot and root
disks (I know the procedure is different now, I think the rescue disk is
all you need), and before I got the nice menu screen, there was a plain
terminal-like screen about creating and initializing a swap partition. My
memory of this is sort of vague, but essentially it allowed me to use
fdisk (or cfdisk, I'm not sure) to partition my hard drive and create a
swap partition and activate it, all before actually starting the real
install program. I think the way the screen was worded, made it sound
sort of 'optional' but on a 4 Meg system it is REQUIRED. Hopefully, Bruce
has gotten back to you outside of the list. I know he has done quite a
bit with 'low memory' systems.
If however you are getting this all before you have the oportunity to
create a swap partition you may have another problem where your system
doesn't get to see all 4 Meg of memory. I remember seeing something on
this list recently about some systems that were configured with 'Shadow
RAM' enabled having problems. Check out:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/Debian-1.2/disks-i386/current/install.html
(The current Debian 1.2 installation instructions, 2.0.27 is the Linux
kernal version) There is a section under 'Configuring Your System' about
Shadow RAM.
Hope this helps,
- Don
-----
Don Prezioso Ashland University Phone: (419) 289-5015
System Programmer/Analyst 401 College Avenue E-mail: dprez@ashland.edu
Administrative Computing Ashland, OH 44805 http://www.ashland.edu/~dprez
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