On Friday 07 March 2003 06:09 am, Christopher Steimer wrote: > I have recently purchased a book, SAMS Teach Yourself LINUX In 24 Hours, in > order to inroduce myself to LINUX and all it has to offer. It comes with > Linux-Mandrake 7.1, GPL Edition. > > I also just purchased a used Dell Pentium II, 450MHz, 128MB RAM, 8G hard > drive off of EBay. > When attempting to install LINUX on the machine, I am unable to partition > the hard drive. I recieve an error message at the beginning of the > partition process that says something about the disk being too corrupted > and also receive the following error message when I try to Auto Allocate: > > [Writing of partition table failed at > /usr/bin/perl-install/partition_table.pm line 442] > > I am new to this, and would like any assistance possible. But go easy on > me, cuz I'm just starting. > > Thank you! > > _________________________________________________________________ > The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
WOW, 7.1 rides again!!!!! If you want to have both windows and linux on your system, you need to make partitions for each to exist on. If you want only linux, there should be no problem scrubbing the disk. You can do that with fdisk, and you can get to fdisk this way: boot from CD at splash screen, type F1 at text screen type rescue Then you will have a very basic linux running on your machine type fdisk /dev/hda type m for a menu of what you can do p to print partition table d to delete every numbered partition w to write to disk and exit then reboot and let it come up from the floppy You can make a partition table by starting the install then resetting after it finishes the formatting stage, even making room for a fat32 partition at the beginning of the disk. There are mistakes to avoid 1) if you want windows once you have made a valid partition table, install windows first or else prepare for another educational experience. 2) You do NOT need to make a linux extended partition, ever. This early version will read your partition table as corrupt if you do. (That was all fixed by 8.1 after I joined mandrakesoft and showed the developers the many ways of breaking a partition table and they closed the holes). Just let diskdrake default to whatever partition method it chooses except prefer a primary partition for the FIRST (windows) partition if you intend to use windows on the same machine. 3) If the Dell has a WD (Western Digital) disk drive of 20Gb or larger, then use Mandrake 8.0 or later. There was a problem with an overzealous disk geometry optimizer which would produce Cylinder Head and Sector numbers different from what the BIOS would select with interesting results, but only on drives with a single platter and two heads. There is a kernel message override for CHS numbers, but someone else will have to clue you in to that one. (Hey folks, here's a chance to get one up on Civ) Civileme BTW, you can get the download edition of 9.0 from Cheapbytes or similar for very little money, all 3 CDs of it. I have a 7.1 left here which I use for older notebooks cause nothing was ever as beautiful before or since than KDE 1.1.2 with all those wonderful themes, but I am not parting with it, and I don't have any blanks to burn extra copies.
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
