[Quantian-general] Hard Drive Install

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Cecil,

On 14 February 2006 at 14:34, Cecil Penn wrote:
| I've tried a hard drive installation of Quantian (per the "How to Boot
| Quantian via LILO or GRUB HOWTO") without success.  My "resident" linux
| installation is Fedora Core 4 running on an old Proliant DL360 (this server
| has 2 scsi drives operating as raid 1).  FC4 works fine on this machine.
| I've copied the iso and kernels and initrd files to the locations specified
| in the HOWTO.  I've also modified the GRUB menu.1st file per the HOWTO.

That should probably read menu.lst with an L ('Ell') instead of a 1 ('One').

| When I try to reboot into Quantian, I receive the following error:
| 
| 		root (hd0,0)
| 		Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
| 		kernel /boot/linux26 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init
| lang=us, apm=power-off
| 
| 		Error 15: File not found
| 
| 		Press any key to continue...
| 
| I assume that "file not found" means I've misnamed a file or directory.

Could be, or it could also mean that it fails on the ext2 filesystem.  There
were some reports + patches on the debian-knoppix list regarding a Knoppix
bug in the miniroot file where ext3 was used twice and ext2 was left out. I
*think* we have that fixed thanks to the corrected miniroot.gz by Marco.

That being said, for kernel 2.6 you now need minirt26.gz from the
quantian.alioth.debian.org site, not the one in miniroots.tar.gz [ which is
still mentioned in the HOWTO. ]

| First I confirmed that I copied the files to the correct directory.  It
| seems that FC4 has a file organization slightly different from what is
| assumed in the HOWTO, so I've tried the following variations in the menu.1st
| file:  
| 
| 
| init=/etc/init	->	init=/sbin/init
| 			init/etc/init.d

I think you have that wrong. When grub's menu.lst sets init=/etc/init, it
refers to the system it wants to boot, ie Quantian, which has the /etc/init
link. So don't modify that please...
 
| bootfrom=/dev/hda1/*.iso	->	bootfrom=/dev/ida/c0d0p2/*.iso
| 					bootfrom=/dev/ida/c0d0p1/*.iso
| 	
| bootfrom=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00/*.iso

Uh-oh. Do you / does FC4 run LVM? That may well break it as the minirt26.gz
may not be set up for booting from LVM drives.

| The changed the init line because FC4 has no init file in /etc.  I wasn't
| sure if /etc/init was intended to be a file or directory, so I tried
| /sbin/init (a file) and the directory init.d.  I also tried the strange
| "ida/c0d0p1" because fdisk reports this as the boot partition and there is
| no "hda1" shown in fstab.  I also tried the "VolGroup00/LogVol00" because
| the menu.1st file has an option root=/dev/ VolGroup00/LogVol00 when booting
| into the "resident" Fedora Core 4 OS (kernel version 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp).
| 
| Each time I reboot, I receive the same error message as above.
| 
| What am I missing?  I'm afraid I'm very much a linux newbie (does it show?)
| and any help would be appreciated.

You may be in a tough spot. The quickest workaround could be to grab the
Knoppix 4.0.2 cdrom release, burn that to cdrom and use it to boot into the
Quantian iso using the additional

	bootfrom=/dev/hda1/q*.iso

trick. Again, SCSI disks may dictate a different layout, and LVM may create a
wrinkle. However, if Knoppix 4.0.2 can mount your disks for reading -- ie if
you can click on the icons on the desktop and get your files -- then you
should be fine.

Please report back, we should in any event try to keep the docs current so
suggestions or fixes are always welcome.

Hope this helps,  Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison