Z038
Group: Members
Posts: 16
Joined: Dec. 2004 |
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Posted: Dec. 31 2004,19:30 |
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ke4ntl, thank you for pointing out that thread to me. It was very helpful. As a result of the information in that thread, I've made some progress, but it's of the "two steps forward, one step back" variety. 
I'm going to get this figured out eventually, but I thought I'd give an update on where I am right now.
I was finally able to get the "Install to pen drive" option of DSL to write to my Lexar 256M Jumpdrive Pro. I can mount it and browse it, but I can no longer boot it. Might be a BIOS thing, I'm not sure yet. When I boot Fedora off my HDD with the USB key in the slot, Fedora tells me my BIOS appears not to have the fix for K8 errata #93 and suggests disabling Legacy USB support. So I've got to go research that. It didn't used to tell me that with my original factory formatting of my USB drive.
I didn't find sfdisk to be all that intuitive to use. I tried to use it like you suggested, but because I ultimately plan to use the triple boot install with the 60M QEMU shared drive, I was aiming for 128M for each of two partitions.
sfdisk interprets the partition size you specify as cylinders, by default, if it is able to interpret the drive geometry. So it would take 75 or 128 to be cylinders, not mebibytes. I couldn't figure out how many cylinders to specify to get two drives of 128M, especially since I wasn't sure whether that should be based on the old or new cylinder size, but after googling a bit, I discovered that I could change the units to mebibytes. Much nicer that way.
Here's what I entered that worked, after numerous attempts that either failed altogether or worked but didn't give me what I wanted:
[root@localhost /]# sfdisk /dev/sda -uM << EOF
> ,127
> ;
> EOF
And here is the output:
Checking that no-one is using this disk right now ...
OK
Disk /dev/sda: 1980 cylinders, 8 heads, 32 sectors/track
Old situation:
Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 0+ 247- 248- 253439+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
New situation:
Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 0+ 126 127- 130047+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 127 247- 121- 123392 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
Warning: no primary partition is marked bootable (active)
This does not matter for LILO, but the DOS MBR will not boot this disk.
Successfully wrote the new partition table
Re-reading the partition table ...
If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1)
to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1
(See fdisk(8).)
Then I tried to use the frugal_usb.sh script again to build the system, and it failed due to an odd number of sectors, or something like that. The script suggests setting mtools_skip_check=1 in the .mtoolsrc file. I just exported it instead, as in export mtools_skip_check=1, then ran the frugal shell script again, and this time it built the system on my USB drive.
TA DUM! I could smell success... but it was not to be... not just yet...
My system used to recognize the original jumpdrive and try to boot from it, and then I would get the syslinux.cfg error, but like I said before, now the BIOS skips over it and boots Fedora from my HDD and gives me that K8 errata #93 error.
Anyway, I've got enough other things to try that I don't need any more immediate help right now. I'll post back later with more results, as the saga continues... Alas, first I have to go paint my bedroom. Whatadrag! I really hate it when real life intrudes too much into my play time. 
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