Install trouble
Come ye, gather round, and listen to my tale of woe.
I was having trouble getting my ATAPI CDROM recognized as a block
device. I was advised to use the boot image from the disks/alt
directory and sure enough, the boot disk saw it! But the installation
didn't go well with my other 0.93 Release 5 installation disks so
I downloaded Release six root and base disks. Installing with these
worked perfectly! The CDROM mounted with no problems.
But horror, while trying to pop a floppy out of the drive I accidentally
hit the reset button!
The next time I tried to boot, fsck couldn't parallelize! (What this
means I don't know. All explanations appreciated.) No problem, says
I, I'll just reinstall. The first few reinstall attempts failed to
take (for reasons I don't remember now. One time the whole thing
froze after I typed the U in US to pick my time zone.) and I always
received hundreds of "Warning -- bdflush not running" type messages.
I kept plugging away, thinking the next reinstall would be the one.
Now, unfortunately, after I install the base disks and go to configure,
I get a box telling me I need to mount the file system or install
the base disks. This happened twice. So I figured wiping the
hard disk and starting from scratch should turn the trick. I've
deleted my linux partitions and rebooted. Then I created the partitions
anew and continued with the install. Same problem when I go to
configure.
So I guess the question is, how do I wipe the hard drive? I prefer to
do it under linux if possible because DOS doesn't know my linux
drive exists. But I suppose I could try it from DOS as well. All disk
drives are run off the same VLB EIDE controller card. Linux disk
is primary slave. CDROM is secondary master.
And the next question is, assuming I can erase everything off the hard
drive will I be able to reinstall successfully? I assume so unless
something gets written to the installation floppies that might screw
things up.
Thanks for your time and patience.
Take care,
Tracy
sweat@mmc1001.lfwc.lockheed.com
tsweat@flash.net
Reply to: