Debian partitions

[Victor Odhner]

Thanks EBo,

The instructions below are welcome, but I haven't yet
boostrapped to the point where I can use them.
There is no make* or gcc* anywhere on the system.

I have followed the Debian install to the point of
trying to "Make Linux Bootable Directly from Hard Disk",
or "Make a Boot Floppy".  Neither of these work.

I have no base installed, just what's in the
ramdisk, which comes from the rescue and boot diskettes.

Vic

"John (EBo) David" wrote:

Victor Odhner wrote:
>
> Thanks, all -- I understand more now, but apparently not enough.
>
> I'm unable to set up a bootable disk, so one thing I did
> was to create /dev/hda1 as a little /boot partition, which is
> mounted onto /boot in the root partition.  But still no luck.
> All the details are listed below.
>
> Current problems:
>
>  "LILO wasn't able to install" in the MBR.
>    [Q1] Any way to force this manually?
>
>  LILO won't install in the root partition either, which is
>    understandable since that's not a valid boot sector.
>
>  I can't create a boot disk that will use the image on the
>    hard disk.
>
> Questions:
>  1. Why can't I install LILO?
>  2. Why can't I create a boot disk?
>  3. Is my root partition going to be too small?

hmmm what is the size of your new kernel?  I seem to remember something
about size of the kernel causing troubles...  Ahhh... here it is (from
the readme in the /usr/linux/README

 - Do a "make bzImage" to create a compressed kernel image.  If you want
   to make a boot disk (without root filesystem or LILO), insert a
   floppy in your A: drive, and do a "make bzdisk".  It is also possible
to do
   "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the kernel
   makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first.

   To do the actual install you have to be root, but none of the normal
   build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain.

 - In the unlikely event that your system cannot boot bzImage kernels
   you can still compile your kernel as zImage. However, since zImage
   support will be removed at some point in the future in favor of bzImage
   we encourage people having problems with booting bzImage kernels to
   report these, with detailed hardware configuration information, to the
   linux-kernel mailing list and to H. Peter Anvin <hpa+linux@zytor.com>.

I would try that...

  EBo --