See responses interspersed below.
At 12:11 PM 11/14/99 +0200, Cristian Carnutu wrote [in part]:
>Then I was asked to put the supp floppy in drive a: and so I did.
>Then I was asked what I want to use,Diskdruid or fdisk. I answered
>Diskdruid and the message was:
>
> " No drives found
>
>An error has ocured-no valid devices were found
>on which to create newfilesystems.Please check
>your hardware for the cause of this problem."
This is the key to your problem. You'll recall that I asked in a prior
message whether you were quoting the message you saw accurately, and here
you indicate that you weren't. The message you "quoted" in your prior e-mail
-- "There is no HDD on your computer" -- is not even a good paraphrase of
what you now say you saw, let alone an actual quote.
The message you now quote probably does NOT mean that the RH installer
cannot find a hard disk -- it means that it cannot find a hard disk with
usused space on it. This is not surprising, as you tell us that you used the
Debian installer to create partitions that filled your hard disk ... so it
really doesn't have any free space.
The answer is to use a different partitioner. Go back to the Debian install
disks you used before. Follow their procedure to get to the choice to
partition a hard disk. Then either delete the Linux (ext2) and swap
partitions you created, then go back to the RH install (which now will be
able to find unallocated space on the drive) or go ahead and do a Debian
install (which should find the partitions just fine). Or use a set of
Slackware disks -- when you get to the point where they tell you to enter
"setup", instead enter "fdisk" and use it to edit your partition table.
Or you an try staying with RH. A bit before the point at which you
encountered the problem, it gices you a choice between using Dish Druid and
using a more basic partitioner (fdisk or cfdisk - I forget which). Make the
other choice and use it to rearrangemyour partitions in a way RH finds more
acceptable.
If with either of these approaches you still can't see your hard disk
partitions, tell us the EXACT messages you get from these approaches. Also,
tell us what fdisk shws when you give it the p command (p = print partition
table).
>
>The problem is the first time I tried with the Debian floppies it worked
>and so I could do the partitions.
>After a few weeks when I really wanted to install it didn't worked
>neither with the same Debian. And the Slackware I tried was the 3.5, I
>used before RedHat.I tried only with old distributions.
Once again ... surely Debian and Slackware didn't give you the EXACT SAME
message you quoted from Disk Druid above (since neither uses Disk Druid).
What did you actually see in these cases. "didn't worked" simply isn;t
informative enough to elicit meaningful advice.
>Could it be a controller problem? The HDD controler is the old style, on
>an ISA card (16 bit).
>I can put the linux on hdb but it is small and I loose 100M on hda
>because MSDOS see only 500M of the 600M. The partitions now are
>hda1/msdos 300M , hda2/ext2 300M, hda3/swap. How can I do to make MSDOS
>to see all the disk and to turn the Linux partitions in DOS partitions
>without looseing data from hda1?
You don't "make MSDOS to see all the disk". That problem is from the age of
your controller -- it's one manifestation of the 1024-cylinder limit. Your
controller is per-LBA. If you really want to fix this problem in DOS, you
need to get an add-in card that patches the IDE BIOS; Promise is one company
that makes them. They provide both the needed BIOS mods to see larger disks
and a connector for the secondary IDE channel (on IRQ 15).
Linux avoids this problem because the kernel contains its own device driver
for IDE disks -- it doesn't rely on the BIOS (once it boots - LILO does rely
on the BIOS, and that is why the boot area has to be within the first 1024
cylinders).
But these comments suggest another explanation for your install problems. If
the drive is 600 megs, and you have 300 megs as a DOS partition, 300 megs as
an ext2 partition ... then where is the swap partition? It sounds like it
has to be size 0. This could be the key to your RH problems -- with only 8
megs on the system, RH would insist on creating a swap partition before it
proceeds, and there simply isn't any room for one (at least not until you
added the second hard disk, which Disk Druid seems to find just fine).
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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