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Saturday,
February 6, 1999 Come on, fellows, it's all a big joke,
isn't it? Linux doesn't actually work; it's a big conspiracy to make me feel like an
idiot. Well I'm on to you. No more laughs here.
Well, all right, I know that's not true, but I feel like I'm on a snipe hunt.
I have a dozen letters from people telling me to just set the active partition on the
disk, using Druid or fdisk. Bully. But this is a bit like Will Rogers telling the Navy how
to solve the WW I submarine problem: "Just boil the Atlantic Ocean. They'll have to
come to the surface. -- Yeah, well, look, I solved your problem, why are you bothering me
asking for details?" I feel the same way. I have booted that system with DOS fdisk,
and I have tried using the Red Hat Druid. In neither case am I told which partition is
where, and which one is the one I am supposed to make active. DOS fdisk offers to make a
partition active, but knows nothing of the names of the partitions. RED HAT fdisk doesn't
seem to have a "list existing partitions" command, although it may be offering
to set one partition active if you know which one it is to set.
I suppose I have several alternatives. One is simply to wipe out all the partitions and
start over; but we did that three times, and I don't have any reason to believe it's going
to work now. There is something in the system that simply will not set the boot partitions
active. Since this machine was running Red Hat 5.1 not 24 hours ago, I assume it knows how
to boot Linux; but it did have a DOS partition on it as well as the Linux. We wiped that
out, reformatted the disk, did everything we could think of but every time when the
installation, which went smoothly, was finished, we got the "cannot find any [active
partition] message. I can boot from a floppy the system made for me. I can boot from the
CDROM.
But I cannot figure out how to make the hard disk have an active partition, or even to
get a list of the partitions installed. Yes, I know: I kept a good log of what we were
doing the first three times we tried all this, but finally I gave up. I know that out
first attempts did not have a "boot" partition and we were going to boot from
the root. That didn't work. I think at the last we set a "boot" partition, but I
don't know which one it is. I don't know anything here, and I think this whole thing was
invented to make me feel like an idiot.
There is more on this in mail.
We also have an interesting excahnge on CDROM
drives, master and slave, over in MAIL; it's the kind of thing that makes me love this
place, even if Linux is working on making me hate it.
I never do column stories that don't have a happy ending, and I am getting up against
column deadlines; we will see if we can solve this mess in a fw hours or if it has to be
put off. There is something very odd about all this. There's
more on the Linux boot problem in mail.
OK, I have work to do, but the Linette problem is solved, and
it's instructive in a horrible sort of way. As Bob Thompson reminds me in our last
exchange of letters (see mail), I do this
stuff so you won't have to. But I tell you this was getting to me.
The solution to the problem was to use DOS fdisk, and randomly select a disk partition
to set as active. As it happens I got the right one first frack, but then to test, I went
back and set the wrong one. That did no harm, so I went back again and set the proper disk
partition as active, after which lilo boots, I can log in, and I am not the proud posessor
of a BIG Linux box. I have forgotten all I knew about Linux -- Darnell was over to show me
that but all his time was consumed overcoming this bug in Red Hat Druid 5.2 which doesn't
seem to want to tell you about active partitions -- so that's all I am going to do with
Linux just now.
One neat thing about 5.2: if you do Control-alt-delete, the system shuts down NOW, but
it does it in an orderly way.
Now I have a lot to get done, and the Red Hat druid ate all the time I had budgeted for
Linux so that will not have much in the column. Next time. But it's working.
It is important though, and do see all the
discourse in mail. Apparently there is a bug in Druid 5.2 that interacts with an Award
BIOS that causes no partition to be set active when you set up Linux with the Red Hat
installer. It is fixable in a few seconds IF YOU KNOW TO DO IT. Use a DOS booter with
fdisk on it, and set the partition active. I used a DOS fdisk and boot from Windows 95b
which is to say one that understands large disk drives; that may or may not be important.
But I did set the partition 1 active, and that did work; but this problem stumped a real
expert for hours (Darnell not me) and stumped me with all my experience in what I call
"the relentless application of logic". It may not cause you any problems, but if
it does, don't go mad, just use fdisk.
And now this:
Roger G. Smith rgsmith@c-gate.net
Jerry,
D. W. Electrochemicals Ltd can be found at http://www.stabilant.com/bccomp.htm. You’ll find Product and ordering information, Application and
Tech Notes, Labeling and Reviews. Several Byte Reviews are there, including the May, 1985
column where Stabilant 22 (as tweek) won "Product of the Year". That review even
includes a picture of you that has no resemblence to Isaac Asimov... :-)
Roger
Thanks! I still use that stuff. It's wonderful. Simplest hardware problem preventer I
know.
And the end of the story on booting Linux with Red
Hat 5.2 is here.
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