Hi!
Two days ago I made an upgrade. A major upgrade. I had a 486/100Mhz
with 530M hard drive and 8M Ram. I won't mention the rest because the
rest it the same. Now it is K6-2/300Mhz with 64 DRAM PC100 and another
8.4 hard drive. Of course the MB was changed.
I got home with the pieces, I disassembled the old one, and build the
new computer. All fits in place and it's working. I positioned the IDE
drives as follows: Primary master - the new drive (WD Caviar). Primary
slave - IDE CD-ROM. Primary master the old drive (Samsung).
Now, windoze works fine. It gave me a couple of blue screens, but here
I'm not sure if it's a memory fault or just windoze. I'll have to run
Linux and see wether it drops core files or not. Actually here is a
small tech problem - I find stupid the way windoze manages the drives.
I mean all the time I had two partitions at most. Now they are three.
One small... in order to let the Linux partition start before that 1023
cylinder. Than a 2G one - extended filled with one logical. And there
is another primary partition on the old drive. The way I see it they
should receive letters in this order... like in Linux. But windoze
names D: the primary partition on the second drive. Is there something
wrong with the way I see it or is there something wrong with the way m$
sees it? I mean, Ok... let it be this way. But when I'll buy a new
vcard as well, I could make the old computer back, and have two
computers. So I'll extract the old drive. But their 'shortcuts' are
related with the software put on the E: drive which will become D:.
Because I made a small primary partition, alll the software, but windoze
itself, it's positioned on the logical partition. Anyway, that was the
off-topic part.
Now back to Linux. I'll keep the old drive on the second IDE. This is
the way it should be. Because now, it is just backing media. I tried
to make a boot disk. So I rewrote the /etc/linux.conf to reffer not to
/dev/hda3 but to /dev/hdc3. Side note: please tell me if I made
something stupid, because all I did I did because I thought it was
right.
Of course, lilo didn't want to write the floppy because it said it
can't see /dev/hdc. Of course it can't see it! It didn't existed at
that moment. But I needed it to reffer to that partition. So the only
thing I can think of it's that lilo jumps directly at the starting point
of a partition, when booting, instead of reading the partition table at
boot time.
I said what the hell and I went further with the install. I just
prepared loadlin with a bzImage = to avoid problems with modules. So I
invoked it with `loadlin bzimage root=/dev/hdc3`. It went well, till
INIT. There I could hear the old drive working. But that was all. For
quite a while. At this particular moment I remebered that there are
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit si /etc/fstab which reffer to partitions as well,
and I didn't change them. I have RH4.2 with kernel 2.0.30 on the old
drive and I got a CD with ZipSlack 3.5. I preffer SW. But... hmm... I
don't like ZipSlack. At this point I just used the rescue disk provided
with ZS. I managed to change those two files. And nothing. It doesn't
get past Initializing random seed. I agree, I changed almost all rc
files on my comp. But those 'base' rc files were just optimised for
speed. So I erased the comments, where they weren't vital, I put the
full path for each command, and took off the commands that did something
useless. I didn't change the order of the commands.
And here starts the funny part. First I got an error... something
about not reading a certain point. I don't recall it. I was too
upset. Because the screen was just filling up with the same error.
Ok. Write it once, write it twice, but it kept writiong the same line.
I was aware the screen was changing... those fips, and there was still
the same line over and over again. I installed ZS and mounted the old
partition. It said it wasn't unmounted cleanly. Fine. I unmounted it
back and run e2fsck for it. The report was ok. I thought to myself
that was it. And retried to boot /dev/hdc3. At this point I was said
that it could npt read the superblock, and either that is not an ext2
drive or it's corrupted. How? Why? How come? I know how to handle
hardware. So far I didn't have any problems from building computers. I
was reccomended to use something like e2fsck -b 8193 and I was gaven the
prompt. The partition was read-only at this point. Question: what is
that superblock? I never encountered this, AFAIK. I did the
correction, as it was said with `e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdc3`. It was Ok.
Reboot. Same problem. I don't believe in coincidences. How come a
hard drive that served me well 4 years, and it suffered a lot:
repartitions, formats, transport to use like a large floppy for games,
and so on. So how come it fails right now?
So I try a new aproach. I mount the old Linux partition and the
partition that has to be the /root for the new system. I copy all from
one to another. After that, I do the changes with all the files that
reffer to partitions, to reflect the changes. And nothing. Am I
missing something here? I need something to boot. The old floopy wants
/dev/hda3 and now it's /dev/hda2 on a different drive. I even set up
the swap with mkswap, than swapon /dev/hda3. It worked. Why doesn't
this work? Sorry for comparing Linux to windoze, but there is something
like sys c:?
Is there something else to mention? From winter I just entered windoze
to fire up a game. Now I have to use it. It works like a charm
compared with how it was before the upgrade. But I still don't like
it. I know the windoze aproach would be to reinstall RH in the new
location, than mount the old partition and copy the customized rc files,
and the home dirctory (the /etc/passwd and so on). And I'm sure I would
do something like that. But I don't own any Linux CD. And all I have
at home right now are the executables for ZS. I should reach soon the
guy with the RH CD (I know nobody with a SW CD), but it would be nice a
more Linux-like aproach. How do I solve the above problems? How do I
get to boot a partition that has moved? And how do I make a functional
copy of a partition? The new partition is larger, and the old one, had
some 50M free, so space isn't the issue.
Thanks for reading this long post and I surely hope someone will find
some solutions. So far I didn't find any etexts about any of those
issues.
Raider
--
``Liberate tu-temet ex inferis''
