Re: Another newbie question

[Kulwant B. <kul...@bt...>]

Hello Geert/All,

> 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.

Ok, I can try this, what is the syntax of the command to use and where can I
find more information on shell commands (e.g. a manual)? I tried a web search 
but found only info on the most common ones and even the more comprehensive
ones (like http://www.ss64.com/bash/) don't include any info on format!

>> 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.

Ho hum. This may be my stumbling block - although I can see a
screenshot of a Mandrake installation which shows a partition with a 4096
blocksize (at ). This however may be what LINUX can do to a partition with a
512 block size and not what it can do with a 4096 block size. The Amiga has
this problem - it can create partitions of any block size from 512 to 16384
(in steps of powers of two) but it can only do this if the original block
size is 512. If the drive has a native block size of 4096, then this becomes
the smallest block size for all partitions on the drive under AmigaOS.  

Where can I find more information on what the LINUX requirements
are with regard to hard disk block size? Are are there any LINUX commands
for low level formatting hard drives with new block sizes? 

Regards, 

Kulwant