I'm a newbie to Linux but have used other flavours of UNIX before (but only as a user). I recently acquired a copy of Debian 3.0 and want to dedicate one of my prehistoric PCs for it -- a 486 DX-4 to be more precise with a Sony CDU-31a CD-ROM drive.
To start with I booted into DOS using a DOS boot disk with DOS drivers from my CD-ROM drive. So far so good. I then ran the installation bat file in the install directory on the CD-ROM. I soon discovered that this was no good since the this did not give me access to the CD-ROM once Linux had booted, so I couldn't continue the installer this way. Next step I decide was going to be to write some boot disks. I then noticed that there are a heap of different boot disk images but I managed to sort out a four-disk 1.44-set that got the installer up and running. Now the fun started. First of all I managed to locate the cdu31a driver for my CD-ROM, but when it asked me for its parameters (which I had previously written down) I could not seem to get things working simply because I didn't realise that 340 (the port address) could not be written as 0340 or 340 but had to be written down using the 0x hex notation. It would have been nice if the example had hinted towards this. Anyway, I managed to get the driver to install, but when it came to install the base packages, the installer simply couldn't mount my CD-ROM. To sort this out I shelled out onto the RAM drive and dug around until I found that the \dev\cdu31 device had been renamed to \dev\sony!!! I figured this out by listing the \dev\cdrom and finding that it pointed (well, "ls -la" displayed "->") at \dev\cdu31 that did not exists! So, not knowing much about file links under Linux, I did the next best thing, I copied \dev\sony as \dev\cdu31 and exited the shell session. This is I believe is a bug with the Debian boot disks (but it could be common to other distros as well, but I wouldn't know). When I now tried to install the base packages, the installer could continue. However, the installer later failed with some error and the return code 1. This will be my next battle... While I'm at it. I have an old BIOS (surprise, surprise) and it does, as you may know, not recognise large disks. However, I'm trying to use the drive that came with it, a 540MB drive, and I have partitioned it like this: 1: 5MB \boot 2: 50MB \swap 3: 50MB \root 4: 435MB \root\usr Although I've written 1 to the start of the disk (as suggested by the installer and HOWTOs), Lilo still cannot install. The installer suggests that the reason for this is due to the large disk-syndrome that you one can experience under old BIOSes. However, I have followed all there is regarding this and still things don't work out. One thing that I'm confused about with regards to partitions is what type they are meant to be -- primary or logical? I just can't seem to find anything on this topic... -Andreas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
