Re: aboot not working or something

[rm.riches@xxxxxxxxxxx (Robert M. Riches Jr.)]

> Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 16:05:06 -0400
> From: Bryan Dina <bdina@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> unfortunately this is not working, I have been reading through the
> documentation and feel embarrassed to say that I have read in the
> installation notes what you are explaining to do.  I am having problems
> getting Disk Druid to recognize the fdisk partitions.... it complains
> that the disk info can not be recognized and wants to initialize the
> disk before continuing.  If I do not initialize the disk, it restarts on
> me, if I do, it erases the disk.  I check with fdisk and the disk
> partitions have been removed.  When I start over with fdisk, I create
> two partitions to keep it simple for now (the machine is slow so making
> errors is not fun), one ext2, and one swap.  I then use "w" to write the
> table(s), and quit fdisk.  I then swap back over to the installer,
> select Disk Druid, and again, it complains and wants to re-initialize
> the disk.  I reboot, and try again with out re-initializing, and again,
> it complains.... what now???  I really would like to install Linux on
> this machine! :)

A couple of suggestions:

  - Make sure to switch fdisk into BSD mode.  You need to
    write BSD-style disklabels, not a DOS-style partition
    table.

  - After using fdisk to partition the disk, go back into
    fdisk (maybe "fdisk -l") to check.

  - You might need to zero out an earlier DOS-style
    partition table.  I don't remember exactly how to do it,
    but you should be able to find it in the axp-list
    archives and/or alpha-related newsgroup archives.  I
    think the method involves using "dd" to write zeros to
    the first couple KBytes of the raw disk device node.

Good luck.

Robert Riches
spamtrap42@xxxxxxxxxxx
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)