Corrupted disk after install...and other problems
Paul D. Shan
Gateway 2000 P5-90, 730Meg EIDE drive, 8Meg RAM, NEC260 CDROM as master on the
secondary IDE, and a Colorado tape backup. I am trying to install Slackware
from InfoMagic's 12/94 3-CD set.
I first tried to install directly from the CDROM, but after some helpful email
from Scott Snyder, I realized that the pre-compiled kernels wouldn't work
since they expect my CDROM to be a slave drive on the primare EIDE interface.
So I decided to dump the whole Slackware distribution to my DOS partition,
install from there, and recompile the kernel with nec260.c altered to reflect
my situation. (It took two frustrating evenings to get to this point).
I've spent the last two nights trying to simply install Linux from the DOS
partition and recompile the kernel. I have had no luck so far.
First, it takes a while to install and answer the questions...that in itself
is not a problem. The problem is that when I reboot right after installation,
the hard drive is always corrupted and a file system check is performed. I've
seen this happen on Sun's before, and the recovery is almost always clean, so
I figured there would be nothing to worry about here...WRONG! Invariably
something gets trashed. Once the drivers in the /usr/linux/src/sound
directory got currupted. Once the KERNEL got corrupted. In the first case, a
recompile failed, and like a dummy I rebooted...the kernel bombed in reboot
halfway through. In the second case, a reboot was not possible since the
kernel was corrupted. In both cases I decided to reinstall FROM SCRATCH all
of the packages in the distribution...30 minutes each time and a lot of
questions to answer.
During another install attempt, the setup routine suggested, as usual, that I
create a boot diskette (which I said I wanted LILO to do anyway). I inserted
a diskette in the floppy drive (the drive is mounted vertically), and hit
Enter to have the setup program do it. Well, the diskette made scratching
noises like it always does when the diskette doesn't seat properly in the
drive. Instead of the setup program saying that it couldn't read from the
drive, it went merrily along to the next step without writing the boot disk.
Without a boot disk I cannot boot into Linux...yet ANOTHER reinstall from
scratch.
At this point I'm thoroughly frustrated. My main questions are: (1) why is
the filesystem corrupted right after an install? It's happened too many
times, and I am sure that my hard drive is not faulty. (2) why, when I say
"make zImage" does this try to overwrite my existing kernel? I thought it
would create a zImage file in the /usr/linux/src directory which I could then
"mv" to the root when I wanted to apply the new kernel. This would save a lot
of reinstalling!!!!
Perhaps these are "newbie" questions, but the FAQ's and HOWTO's are silent in
these questions. Also, apologies for lack of specific detail, but I'm not
sure which information is relevant to my problem...and there is a lot of
information I COULD give.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Paul Shan
Penn State University
Paul...@psu.edu