Topic: Formatting drives

[rhys]

It seems at times as though for economic reasons, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off.

I'm having lots of bother trying to get SME Linux running. I've got a (probably good) book on Linux (A Practical Guide to Lunux by M. Sobell)  with a forward by Linus himself. Interesting that we have the same background - the Vic-20 and are about the same age (he graduated in 1990 like me although I specialised in Cobol under Primos and Pascal under Xenix).

Anyway, I have a machine with (currently two hard drives). They are currently off-RAID at the moment and are on IDE1 and IDE2. One installation is corrupt. The other is fine. How do I exit the user manager (or whatever it's called) and how do I format both drives? My object is that once I have two clean drives I'll reinstall under my RAID card (with mirroring).

Unfortunately I can't access my floppy drive at the moment. I'm hoping it's just a bad IDE cable. If it's not then I'll have to exchange the motherboard (it's 2 weeks old). Thus, everything has to be done under Linux.

I have the installation manual for SME Linux. I printed that from the site from A4 PDF. I can't print web-page based manuals - I tried that and I always seem to lose half the text (usually the ends of each line).

Can anybody assist me with my quest to exit the user manager and format the drives?

Rhys

[Dan Brown]

As you've already been told more than once, you exit the server console by pressing Alt+F2 (or F3), and then log in with "root" as the username, and your admin password.

However, you really don't need to do that--you should be able to hook up your drives to the RAID card, assuming it's supported, boot from the CD, and install.  That will reformat and repartition the drives for you.

Now, if you're really sure you want to do it manually, log in (as above) and do this:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

These commands assume that the drives are attached as primary master and secondary master, and will nuke the partition tables on the drives.

[rhys]

Great. I've managed to get in as root and had a little play around using the commands in "A Practical Guide to Linux". I even discovered I had Pine (which I remember using yonks ago).

sadly,
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
do not appear to have had any effect. I even tried hdg1 and hdg2 (which is what my drives appear to be called) to no avail.

Then I tried booting from DOS (I even managed to get my 3.5" drive working after finding that I could access it from Linux - my error was in the bios) but DOS doesn't recognise drives as big as my 40gb drives. I'd say DOS is probably limited to 20GB.

Next, I put the two drives (one with a corrupted Linux and one with a good Linux) onto my raid card. It came up with a kernel panic and a message about failing to find something called "init". Then I rebooted and booted from the SME Linux CD but it came up with runtime errors and gave a long list of commands that it seemed to think had syntax errors.

I'm not quite at square one now. I've got half a clue. I just need to format the drives and to reinstall Linux. I had a look at the instructions for dd and wasn't much the wiser. It's a pity that the dos emulator only appears to work on floppy disks.

If anybody can suggest where I'm going wrong, I'd appreciate the assistance. I am getting there albeit rather more slowly than I'd anticipated.

Rhys

[Ray Mitchell]

Rhys
Please see my long post at
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=7243.msg26383#msg26383
which should answer your problems.
I spent a bit of time to give you a useful answer so please follow the instructions and it should work.
I see you have made a bit of progress and can get the command prompt now, GOOD !

Yes, the reset partition command appears to do nothing (ie on screen), but if the drives are connected to the correct locations (also as advised) then the partions will be reset. Just shut the machine down immediately after issuing both commands and try the instal again, booting from CD, it should work.

I and others can't give it to you any more clearly than this.
Follow the instaructions and don't be too concerned about what you think or don't think is happening. Then report back your progress.
Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Bill]

Are you the same fella who blasted SME for being a piece of junk? My suggestion is you need to take baby steps. You are adding complications to you configuration. Verify the system can function properly with a single drive attached to the on board IDE Controller. Boot a w98 DOS disk with 'DELPART' on it. It will delete partitions of NTFS and Linux and have been using it for years. It can be found at http://hercules.ksu.ksu.edu/download/msstuff/index.htm. It will delete all the partitions. You need to build the foundation before putting on the roof.

BTW
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