Problems installing Redhat 7.2

[edmonds]

I have been trying to install 7.2 on an old P200 pc with 98 mb ram a 2 gig hard drive plus a 1 gig hard drive. I have done this a couple of times a day for a couple of weeks and it always fails. It says it has run out of hard drive space to copy the image onto.
i partition the 2gig hard drive into 200 swap, 1700 native, and recently a third partition of 50 because i get told that it needs it for some reason.
I try to custom install between 500 and 700 megs.
Does anybody have any idea what i am doing wrong?

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Sounds like RH is detecting the partitions in wrong order. I don't know who told you need to have 50M partition (for /boot probably), I wouldn't say it's required.
Create the partitions so that /dev/hda1 is the biggest native partition (make it ext2), then the swap partition. Disk Druid might be a bit easier to use than fdisk if you're not comfortable with command line and the verbosity of Unix commands

 

[edmonds]

Thanks for replying.
I did what you said but still got: 'An error occured transferring the install image to your harddrive. You are probably out of space.'
Could it be the mount point for my main drive? I set it as '/'.

 

[edmonds]

On further inspection i think i have found the problem:
In Disk Druid i have, on hda1, 1700MB Linux native and 300 mb swap. Though it always seems to have forgotten my mount point.
In fdisk it says hda1 is:
/tmp/hda1, start 1 , end 864, blocks 1741792 , 83 linux
/tmp/hda2, start 865 , end 1024, blocks 322560 , 5 extended
/tmp/hda5, start 865 , end 864, blocks 322528 , 82 linux swap

which seems strange.

i cant get fdisk to change this as it only allows 1024

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Hmm, odd indeed. Is the drive set to use LBA in BIOS? I know that RH7.2's fdisk does support cylinders above 1024th, I've used it dozens of times.

Another thing that could cause this is a limitation in your computer's BIOS, it's too old to recognize big hdds, but 2 gigabytes doesn't sound too big for a Pentium motherboard.. You might want to check if a BIOS update is available, however.

 

[edmonds]

Checked the BIOS and both drives are LBA, and the bios should be OK - it was my main pc for 5 years and ran win95 with these drives and bigger ones.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Have you tried creating the partitions in fdisk only, without using Disk Druid?

Is this drive primary master? If it's not, it could be that RH is trying to write to primary master, whatever it is.

 

[Goalie]

You might try cfdisk- a slightly user friendly fdisk. (Did I just say that in combination?? ) It does a lot of the math for you, can help avoid several common mistakes. All you gotta know is how big you want the partition. Also, I agree with Mictlantecuhtli that flashing the BIOS to the most current version can't hurt.

 

[acidosmosis]

It is possible that the space on your hard-drive(s) are being reported incorrectly. Run scandisk, or...

in Dos Prompt:

chkdsk c: /f
(then reboot the PC)

Also may want to defrag just to be safe.