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Linux woes

earthman

earthman

Golden Member
Is it my imagination or is installing Linux getting harder rather than easier?
Red Hat 7 will not install on my system, it can't seem to understand the hard drive geometry, (Western Digital 20 gig) it sees the cyls/heads/sectors incorrectly (they are correct in the bios) and after the install when I try to boot, it says something about trying to access beyond the end of the drive and there is a kernel panic...I tried using Caldera, but it doesn't support my GeForce 2 card and hangs...all my other distros are too old....I have no Linux now....<depressed>
 
I'm using linux 7.2 and I don't have any sound. I formatted my mandrake 7 install and put in 7.2, and lost sound. network card works, though. just no sound. [sigh]

i'm thinking I'll ditch this pos nic and put in the intel one I have here ...

[thinks of how to take over the world via linux]
randal
 
Could it be that your Linux Partition is using cylinders numbered over 1023? if that is the case then you have to reposition the partition to that area. If you don't want to go through the hassle of moving partitions then boot using a boot diskette.

If all this sounds too confusing you may want to start over by using one of the partitioning utilities such as Sys. Commandar or Partition Magic and use their OS install wizard to do the job of getting your hard drive ready for linux install. BTW, from my experience RedHat 7 has got probably the best install program.
 
I already use system commander.
The problem is that Red Hat thinks there are 10000 cylinders on the disk when there are 2400...I will check out the new boot disk, but otherwise I am not sure how to work around this.
 
Being someone whose been playing with Linux since about '93 or so and seeing what it was like to install Slackware back in those days, I can safely tell you that installing any distribution of Linux on a x86 system is a breeze. If this think install it now is hard, then you wouldn't have enjoyed it back then..

Anyawys, I haven't experienced any sorts of a problem with Linux reading drives that are about 20 gig, in fact, back before the BIOS' were updated to read 8+ gig drives, Linux had no problem.

If at all possible, try to keep your Linux partitions below the 1023rd cylinder(essentially 8 gig), if that is not possible, then atleast keep the /(root) partition below that mark.

I've got a GeForce2 GTS card right now and run RH 7.0 without any problems.

You may want to ensure that you've got the latest revision of your BIOS, if not, upgrade that..

Secondly, rather than using bootdisks, just use the CD themselves, they are all bootable. Regards
 
Actually I have a Slackware 1.0 cd around here somewhere, so I have been doing this for awhile too. I may sound like a newbie, but I have had four seperate distro installations fail on this machine, so I am a little annoyed. The bios is up to date as well. My favorite distro is Caldera, and it is actually installed now, but it hangs on boot because the X server doesn't work. Caldera has no update to XFree at this time.
Interestingly, I have FreeBSD 3.4, and it is also totally confused by this hard drive.
Anyway, I am aware of the 1024 cyl limit, it doesn't seem to matter in this case.
I thought that limit had been overcome on the newer kernels?
 
Update: Got Red Hat installed. Used the update disk, plus the old fdisk to manually set cylinders, heads and sectors, and it worked...working great so far, thanks for the suggestions, guys.


 
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