aboot not working or something

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

> Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 16:05:06 -0400
> From: Bryan Dina <bdina at seresc.net>
>
> unfortunately this is not working, I have been reading through the
> documentation and feel embarrassed to say that I have read in the
> installation notes what you are explaining to do.  I am having problems
> getting Disk Druid to recognize the fdisk partitions.... it complains
> that the disk info can not be recognized and wants to initialize the
> disk before continuing.  If I do not initialize the disk, it restarts on
> me, if I do, it erases the disk.  I check with fdisk and the disk
> partitions have been removed.  When I start over with fdisk, I create
> two partitions to keep it simple for now (the machine is slow so making
> errors is not fun), one ext2, and one swap.  I then use "w" to write the
> table(s), and quit fdisk.  I then swap back over to the installer,
> select Disk Druid, and again, it complains and wants to re-initialize
> the disk.  I reboot, and try again with out re-initializing, and again,
> it complains.... what now???  I really would like to install Linux on
> this machine! :)

A couple of suggestions:

  - Make sure to switch fdisk into BSD mode.  You need to
    write BSD-style disklabels, not a DOS-style partition
    table.

  - After using fdisk to partition the disk, go back into
    fdisk (maybe "fdisk -l") to check.

  - You might need to zero out an earlier DOS-style
    partition table.  I don't remember exactly how to do it,
    but you should be able to find it in the axp-list
    archives and/or alpha-related newsgroup archives.  I
    think the method involves using "dd" to write zeros to
    the first couple KBytes of the raw disk device node.

Good luck.

Robert Riches
spamtrap42 at verizon.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)