Marcus Johnson writes: [snip] > On this,( my first ever installation of Linux) I installed stable > Hamm using LSL's version of the official 2.0 release. Everything went > swimmingly until I got to right before dselect/dpkg where it asks you > to pick which installation type you want. I picked complete > developer. Cool. Then some instructions to the effect that since I > was using a preselected set I didn't need to individually dselect > items to install. Unfortunately I didn't write those instructions > down -- big mistake. I hit return. Oops. I looked for a "go back > one screen type button and there was none. <For basic user interface > being able to escape back to the previous screen is really > important>. It automatically lauches dselect and I'm lost. I pick > one of the choices off the main menu that sounds like it would > complete the installation. It asked where I was going to install > from. I picked CD-ROM off of a list and then it asked me something > about which "block device" it was. Of course I had no idea. It said > I could hit ^c to interrupt. I tried that. It didn't work. <I'd > call that a serious flaw. I think it was because dselect was started > from a script> Being cornered and not knowing what else to do I > rebooted (my m$ dos background showing).
Sounds like you need a basic Linux "howto". Block devices are hd<L#> for IDE drives (where L is a letter and # is the partition on that drive) Primary IDE master drive is hda, slave would be hdb. If a device is a CDROM drive, no partition number is used. Serial devices would be ttyS<#>. Let's assume that you have 1 IDE hard drive with 2 partitions and a CDROM drive. So in DOS terms, you get C: = /dev/hda1 (since windows sits in the first partition) D: = /dev/hda5 (/dev/hda2 is the extended DOS partition, and logical drives start at hda5.) E: = /dev/hdb (CDROM drives do not use partition tables) COM1: = /dev/ttyS0 COM2: = /dev/ttyS1 COM3: = /dev/ttyS2 LPT1: = /dev/lp1 LPT2: = /dev/lp2 PS2 port = /dev/psaux > Okay, I reboot off the floppy and it comes up okay and I login in and > its okay, except all that cool stuff is not installed and the only > file I can see in the root directory is something like "rev_[can't > recall rest of name". I looked at that file in vi, and it looked > like a configuration/installation type of file, but it has columns > that give the program/package name and then it says "deinstall" after > each one. Hmm.. go figure. Well, I'm wondering how do I get back > into that automatic installation script that was working so well > until I lost my way. I wanted to go back to where you select which > type of installation you want and go from there. I couldn't figure > out how to do that. I started dselect. I poked around, but I ended > up back at that same screen where it asked for the block device name. > I still didn't know the answer. At least this time the ^c let me > out. Yeah! > > Well I really wanted to start over at this point. I just wanted to > wipe the partition clean and start over. So I rebooted and tried to > reinitialize my Linux root partition. That worked. I mounted it as > root. Then I tried to reinstall the kernel and base OS. Instead of > starting from a clean state I think there is still remnants on the > partition because it tries to use a "recovery floppy image" from off > of the CD-ROM, but it fails. It not only fails it takes ages to > decide to fail <very user unfriendly in this respect>. So now I'm > really stuck. I have no idea where to go from here. <The doesn't > seem to provide any help at this point> Help! Ack! > > And oh, was the answer to the block device question /dev/hdc ? > > Thank you for patiently helping a newbie, > > Marcus At this point, use MSDOS/WIn95 fdisk to delete the Linux partition. Then start over with Linux. I'd recommend that you pick up a book on Linux. While it most likely won't be Debian specific, it will have the basic information on how Linux does things. Also, make sure that you have a swap partition. A swap partition is like the virtual memory in Win95/3.1 only Linux allows up to 16 swaps and win95/3.1 only allow 1 swap. -- -= Sent by Debian 1.3 Linux =- Thomas Kocourek KD4CIK @[EMAIL PROTECTED]@westgac3.dragon.com Remove @_@ for correct Email address --... ...-- ... -.. . -.- -.. ....- -.-. .. -.-