problem with installation

[dacq]

I have a SATA drive (sda) & installed a Linux operating system on my second SATA drive, sdb5. Booting to that operating system I then used Unetbootin to do a frugal installation of Porteus. When I tried to boot to Porteus it gave an error saying there was no hd(1,4) partition.

[francois]

Which bootloader (grub legacy, grub2 ...) did you used for the booting of these two hdd? What is the output of fdisk -l in command line? When you are on another os installation, do you see the /porteus folder? What other os do you have on these hdd?

Installing porteus on hdd should be really simple:
1) format a partition with ext4
2) mloop the porteus iso
3) copy the /boot and /porteus folder on the partition
4) provide a menu entry the actual bootloader (which was in your case?)
or
5) install a new bootloader (personally I prefer grub legacy or grub2, but it seems that syslinux and other could also do the job) depending on the nature of the already installed os. For example, if you have ubuntu and debian and windows, grub2 would be more simple to install as grub2 will recognize them all out of the box.

[Ed_P]

It sounds like Unetbootin doesn't support Porteus. Have you tried Easy2boot? It supports Porteus.

[francois]

@Ed:
What is the interest to add persistance to porteus which works with persistence already?

[Ed_P]

@Francois

?

[dacq]

I have already used Unetbootin to successfully do a frugal installation of Porteus on the first drive (inside Mandriva Linux). Grub1 is used.

The Porteus folder is there but fdisk -l gives an error message.

[dacq]

(Mandriva Linux) is on both drives.

[francois]

Please provide the full output of fdisk -l.
Thanks.

[dacq]

As I said "fdisk -l" only gives an error message.

[Slaxmax]

As I said "fdisk -l" only gives an error message.

Only root can execute fdisk (password toor)

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:/mnt/sda2$ su
Password: 
root@porteus:/mnt/sda2# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

[Ed_P]

dacq, can you tell us what the error message says?

Slaxmax, I don't find that to be the case.

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2bd2c32a
 :
 :
etc 

[dacq]

Slaxmax was right. I had to use root in Mandriva.

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00082699

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 226 1815313+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 227 19457 154472977 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 227 1259 8297541 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 2425 4848 19470748+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 4849 19457 117346761 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 1260 2424 9357831 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 239 1919736 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 240 38913 310648905 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 240 38913 310648873+ 83 Linux

[brokenman]

When I was playing with the same SATA setup (back in the day) I ran into a similar problem. With the ATA interface 28 bits are used for the sector number interface between the operating system, BIOS and the hard disk. This means a hard disk can have a maximum of 2^28 or 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes. This puts the ATA interface maximum at 128 GiB or approximately 137.4 GB.

Check if your BIOS has this limitation.

[dacq]

There is something else I should mention. When I installed Porteus on the second SATA it gave me a question, something like "Do I want to overwrite vmlinuz?" Yes to all, Yes or No? Normally I never get this question. I chose 'Yes to all' & I could not boot into Porteus or Mandriva.

I then attempted to install Porteus again and got the same question. This time I tried to close the question box by clicking on the X in the top right corner. It was then that I got the "no hd(1,4) partition" error when I tried to boot.

[dacq]

My BIOS has no problems with drives above 137Gb.

I used Unetbootin when I successfully installed Porteus on the first SATA drive.