Joho the Blog
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July 03, 2003
Continuing from last night's humiliating defeat.... I booted from the floppy this morning and rooted around, so to speak, just to see what I could see. It seems like something is installed on the hard drive, but I can't tell if the kernel is. What I used to know of unix is coming back to me. It's just like riding a bicycle: if you don't do it for a long enough period, you get too stupid, fat and old to be able to do it again. I'm reinstalling now, using the "noprobe" parameter, although I think the problem is in my hw. Sigh. I'm telling the RedHat installer to install only the GUI desktop packages, hoping to get through an install without something blowing up... It got through the installation but now warns me that no kernel packages were installed on my system so my boot loader won't be updated. I don't know if that means that no new kernel packages were loaded or that I'm truly a boy without a kernel. I guess I'll find out in a minute when I reboot. Nope. Booting from the hard drive still causes the system to hang: black screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I've got to go. I'll try again later... Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 3, 2003 08:19 AM
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Comments
It's been a while since I've done this sort of support, but my first suspicion would be the BIOS configuration and whether or not you have the various storage devices connected and configured properly.
I'm assuming you have IDE devices and are connecting to IDE controlers? Are they in the proper master slave relationships? Does the CD drive need any special low level driver software, i.e., software that would have been loaded by DOS or Windows via config.sys but is now not being loaded? Similarly the hard drive? Is it the master device or is the CD the master or boot device according to the BIOS configuration?
If I were wearing an "institutional" hat and doing this by the book, I'd make sure the hardware configuration you are going to use actually is known to work properly (electrically and BIOS-wise) before I started installing the Linux software.
Posted by: ed nixon | July 3, 2003 09:48 AM
The bios recognitions both the hd and the cd. And Linux does to; it completes a partition and format without complaining.
Posted by: dweinberger | July 3, 2003 12:32 PM
"Recognitions"?? What sort of moron am I?
Posted by: dweinberger | July 3, 2003 12:44 PM
There's no moron like an exasperated genius. . . .
Posted by: AKMA | July 3, 2003 12:50 PM
Wasn't that one of those thick, but important novels I never read? Willaim Gaddis?
Sorry, David. I've exhausted anything more "helpful" I could say; nothing left but limp, soggy humour.
I wish I could help. Have you formatted everything clean and started from scratch?
Posted by: ed nixon | July 3, 2003 04:47 PM