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 hdL# 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.
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Thomas Kocourek KD4CIK
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