>> New problem: Booted into DSLinux, my HD does not appear so I can't >> wipe it. blkid and fdisk -l only show the USB stick assigned to >> /dev/sda which is how I accidentally wiped it in the first place. >> I'll try another distro on the USB stick.
DSLinux couldn't find my HD because it needs the "sata" boot parameter explicitly passed. However, after doing that it crashes while loading the sata module. This is discussed online with no solution presented. > If DSLinux is what I think it is, it may have been (on hindsight) > rather obvious that it may not support the block device your system HD > is on or the filesystem used. The DS, afterall, has fairly predictable > hardware. > > Something like DBAN or SysResCD will have a better chance of > supporting a wider array of hardware. The problem with those two is I need something that can install to the HD after wiping it. I also need something that can install on a 512MB USB key since my 8GB key does not seem to be bootable. DSLinux was a flop as described above, so I'm downloading Puppy Linux now. It's about 100MB, and it has the "Puppy Universal Installer" which should install to my HD. Hopefully it fares better with my SATA hardware than DSLinux did. Also, in case it helps anyone in the future, unetbootin has a very annoying habit of failing to download the selected ISO, returning no error, and in fact reporting installation success. The symptom of this is a boot menu with only "Default" available, which goes nowhere. The solution is to download the ISO manually and point unetbootin to it. I'll report back with Puppy Linux results. - Grant
