Thanks again, Stew. I finally had a smooth install last night. Here are
just a few follow-on notes for anyone in the same peculiar situation as me
that may need to perform a HD install from a ext2 partition:
<snip>
>>
>> 1) You state that I should mount the isos, copy the contents to the hd
>> partition (/dev/hda11), and place all of the RPMs into one folder,
>> Mandrake/RPMS. Should the name of the directory be RPMS1 as on the
>> iso or RPMS as you state above?
>>
>
> Nope - RPMS is the correct name, although you make get away with RPMS1,
> RPMS2 under Mandrake - never tried it.
>
> A caveat - if you combine them all together - now hdlists is wrong. If
> you grab from the mirror, it is already setup in this manner. (don't know
> if you have a high speed connection or not).
I fell victim to this caveat. Fortunately, I poked inside the hdlist file
an guessed that it was expecting both the RPMS1 and RPMS2 directories. When
I copied these folders intact into the Mandrake directory, everything ran
smoothly. (Just for good measure, I created sym links to all files in each
RPM directory and again in a third directory called RPMS. Call me
superstitious.)
I do have a high speed connection, thank goodness, but it's not yet
functional under Linux (next project). Therefore, all my downloads were via
the Mac OS. I was afraid that the Mac OS would be chopping RPM names left
and right, so I stuck with the isos.
>
>> 2) I'm working under the assumption that I can allow the installer to
>> create the /home directory on the / (root) partition (hda10) and later
>> change things in fstab such that the install directory (hda11) will be
>> mounted as /home instead. Will this work? Are there any things I
>> need to be careful of?
>>
>
> Why do it one way and then change? The installer can setup /home as
> separate. Certainly you can move /home to another partition later, you
> just need to make sure it's mounted with correct permissions, and all the
> files copied to the new partition retain the correct permissions.
I might (read: probably am) doing something wrong here, but if I mount the
partition containing my install files via DrakDisk (?), the installation is
unsuccessful. The installer is unable to find any of the RPMS on this
partition. I thought I'd work around this by postponing any user creation
until after the install when I've had a chance to set up this partition as
home in fstab.
OK. Time to play with Mandrake. Hope this follow-up is helpful to someone
out there!
-Chris
