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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
