Hi, I am trying hard to install Linux-Mandrake 7.1 Deluxe on my new notebook computer SONY PCG-SR9G/T with a 12.1GB harddisk. The best way I can do is installing from harddisk. I've made 7 subdirectories: disk1 .. disk7 on a spare partition d: and copied files from the 7 installation disks to the above 7 subdirectories by the "xcopy * /s" DOS command. Everything looks fine in DrakX until the "please wait, look for available packages" message appears. After this message disappeared, the installation program halt at the "install system" step. Nothing shown on the screen except those installation steps on the left side. I've also tried to use the text mode installation. The install program halt on the "Linux-Mandrake Installation Setup filesystems" screen. Only this title on the top and those function keys at the bottom are displayed. I've to reboot my notebook for both cases. Two pieces of information may be useful to diagnose the problem. First, when I used the text mode installation from harddisk, I got the following warning message: The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1467. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Second, the Sony notebook has reserved about 500M on the harddisk for its own usage. The DOS fdisk command shows only 11507MB total disk space with 3828M for primary partition and 7680M for the extended partition. When I tried to use the auto allocation for swap and ext2 partition, the bars representing the first two FAT32 partitions shift unexpectedly. I've bypassed this problem by using FDISK to reallocate the partitions manually and changing the partition type to 'swap' and 'ext2' using the DrakX installation program. I wonder if the reserved space cause some calculation problem for the auto allocation and some other problems later on. FYI, it is a P-III 600 machine with 64M RAM. Thanks for your help. Lawrence Lee __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Messenger - Talk while you surf! It's FREE. http://im.yahoo.com/
