Re: Another newbie question

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On 3 Jan 2003, Kulwant Bhogal wrote:
> Many thanks for your pointer. I got the Debian installer system to run using the
> following bootstrap command (after setting up my partitions using the Amiga
> OS3.9 HDToolbox program): 
> 
> bootstrap --apus -k /apus/linux.bin -r /apus/root.bin root=/dev/ram nobats
> 60nsram video =pm2fb:mode:1024x768-60  
> 
> (if you see italics where the "/" forwardslashes should be in the above line then you need to
> turn off text styles in your email program).
> 
> However, after successfully decompressing the image file and starting the
> installation program where I can successfully select the language and keyboard, I cannot
> specify the swap partition or initialise any partitions because the LINUX installer
> program says there is a problem: 
> 
> No ext2 partitions that had not already been mounted were detected
> <continue>
> 
> I suspect that this is due to my earlier mentioned question about a hard
> disk with a 4096 byte sector size instead of the more usual 512 byte sector
> size. 

I actually saw similar things with the Debian installer on mipsel. The
installer never saw any formatted partitions.

Can you try opening a shell (it's in the installer menu), and manually format
and mount the partition(s) under /target? After that you can close the shell
and skip the initialisation and mounting steps in the installer. That worked
for me.

> Does LINUX only support HDs with 512 bytes per sector and if so does anyone
> know of an Amiga low level format program that actually works (i.e. can
> reformat a HD with 4096 bytes per sector to 512 bytes per sector?). If LINUX
> can initialize a 4096 bytes per sector HD/partition then what am I doing
> wrong? What do I need to do to get the installation program to detect the
> partitions?  

Sorry, I don't know. I once got a Mac SCSI hard disk with 488 (??) bytes per
sector, and that didn't work.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds