Trouble installing Knoppix 5.0 Debian

thefear78

Hello technicians and aspiring technicians!

Here is my problem.... I successfully installed Knoppix 5.0 and set it up as a Telnet/FTP/TFTP/HTTP server (and must say I learnt quite alot doing it!) Then I discovered when I tried to cpio a cdrom to /dev/hda1 that I had done my install on the wrong hd, it was only 3.4GB leaving me a few hundred MB's of space!!

No biggie I figure, reinstall on a 40GB drive. My Award 1007.A Asus P5A bios just hangs and never detects the hd. I mounted the drive using the Knoppix live CD and looked, everything installed there as it should be. I didn't change anything in the Bios so I figured it was a corrupt hd. I've since tried several times on two different hard drives and nothing. I put the hd in a different box and it just drops me into a limited kernel.

I understand PNP OS should be set to disabled and overclocking turned off, it is... There is only one drive (set as master) on IDE0 so there is no confusion there either...

I'm about ready to pull my hair out over this so any help is appreciated!! Please help me get back off my XP drive!!

Thanks!

Fearon
A+, N+, CCENT

Mishra

It sounds like you have overwritten your EDIT:Bootloader.

sthomas

It sounds like it may be an issue with the Linux boot loader. Unfortunaltey it has been to long since I have done anything with Linux so don't make fun of me if I say this wrong but I believe if you are using Lilo you will want to check the lilo.conf file and if you are using grub check the grub.conf file.

Mishra

A little confusing post for me. I am going off the assumptions of "Please help me get back off my XP drive" and the fact he said he installed it on the wrong drive and he also put in the live CD and said he "saw his files".

I'm guessing the scenario is 1 desktop, 2 hard drives, he installs linux and it overwrites his boot loader putting its own boot loader in there and he can't boot back into windows.

If the OP could elaborate for me please.

thefear78

I installed from a live knoppix cd to hard drive. I disconnected my XP drive entirely to avoid confusion when I did this. So the only drive it could/should detect is the Linux hd but it doesn't. After five install tries on two different drives I don't believe it is a problem with grub.conf it looks okay. I tried installing boot to both mbr and /, both with no luck.

I'm running out of ideas??

dynamik

Does the installation actually complete? Can you just not load the OS, or is the installation not detecting your drive?

Mishra

I've ran into quite a few times where I have to specify a boot partition because of disk sizes and the controller and stuff like that. It has become the norm for me to use one. You might want to partitions your disks in that way

/boot - 500mb
/swap - 1gb
/ - rest of disk

thefear78

The bios detects other drives (cdrom and XP drive) that I connect to IDE0. It never detects the Knoppix 40GB hard drive. Interestingly, yes it does detect the 3.4GB Knoppix hard drive when it is connected to IDE0. I think I will try repartition it tomorrow and see if perhaps that makes a difference.

And yes when I "mount /dev/hda1" I can see vmlinuz, boot and everything else has installed properly. Knoppix-installer reports everything installed successfully with no errors.

Mishra

thefear78 wrote:

The bios detects other drives (cdrom and XP drive) that I connect to IDE0. It never detects the Knoppix 40GB hard drive. Interestingly, yes it does detect the 3.4GB Knoppix hard drive when it is connected to IDE0. I think I will try repartition it tomorrow and see if perhaps that makes a difference.

And yes when I "mount /dev/hda1" I can see vmlinuz, boot and everything else has installed properly. Knoppix-installer reports everything installed successfully with no errors.

I feel like I'm lost in the conversation for some reason.

Have you tried hooking your CD-rom and XP drive to the secondary IDE controller?

And you have tried the Linux hard drive in the primary IDe controller but it still doesn't boot?

thefear78

I've tried the linux drive in both primary and secondary IDE with no luck. The XP drive and cdrom are identified when hooked up to both IDE0 and IDE1 so I know that's not the problem

sthomas

Try a different distro besides knoppix.