🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear all,

Forgive me for this long note, and for triple-posting it; I typed this up once
and it appears to have vanished into the ether, so I'm doing it again, this
time to two newsgroups.  (I know, I deserve flaming; I just wanna make sure
*someone* sees this!)  I hope someone has the patience to read it . . . and the
knowledge to help me!  I think I've done one or more stupid things; I'm having
problems as a result:  'setup' won't see or mount my MS-DOS partition properly,
and won't install Slackware from it -- though it has done so before I messed
things up.

My system:  80486DX50 on a VLB motherboard, 16 megs RAM (four 4-meg chips in
bank 0), some boring IDE controller, Western Digital Caviar 540 meg EIDE drive
(model AC2540RTL), Trident SVGA card, Packard Bell VGA monitor, Microsoft bus
mouse, 3.5" boot floppy, 5.25" secondary floppy, joystick w/card, external
modem on MS-DOS's COM2:, MS-DOS partition using version 6.22.

I downloaded several disk sets of Slackware 2.1.0 from linux.nrao.edu, which
mirrors ftp.cdrom.com (except the sources, I think?).  I repartitioned my
MS-DOS partition so I had most of the drive free, using something called
presizer -- an MS-DOS program for resizing partitions.  It seemed to work fine.
 I installed Linux, and it worked like a charm -- I used the bare boot disk and
the color144 root disk, and I was able to use LILO to boot to either my MS-DOS
or my Linux partition.  Linux saw my MS-DOS partition as /dosc, where I had
told setup to mount it.

I then realized that I didn't have enough space on my MS-DOS partition to
download more of Slackware 2.1.0, and I thought I'd made my swap partition too
big (don't remember my thinking on that exactly).  So I used presizer to resize
the MS-DOS partition, and LILO freaked out (just printed LI), so I tried
various tricks and finally (using Norton Disk Doctor for MS-DOS, and trying to
remember how to fix the master boot record, which I thought had been
corrupted).  Eventually MS-DOS booted okay.  (Somewhere in here, I removed the
Linux root and swap partitions, possibly with MS-DOS's [grimace, cringe, blush,
biting tongue] FDISK.)

Sometime around here, I got a new video card (a Cirrus Logic something-or-other
VESA card) and a SoundBlaster Pro v.1 card, with attendant proprietary CD-ROM
drive.

Then came the problem, which I'll describe in detail below.  setup wouldn't
mount my MS-DOS partition properly, or at all, or couldn't see it, or whatever,
and I couldn't install from that partition!  I finally read about FDISK /MBR
and did it to make sure my master boot record was kosher.  I even went so far
as to make an extended partition and a logical D: drive, copy all my files
there, re-format the C: partition, copy 'em back, and remove the D: partition.

Here is exactly what happens, step by step, and the attendant error messages:

I boot with the bare boot disk.  The partition check reveals:

     hda: WDC AC2540H, 515MB w/127KB Cache, CHS=1048/16/63, MaxMult=16
     hda: hda1 hda2 hda3

I have tried this several times, so my Linux fdisk'd hda2 & hda3, the root and
swap partitions to-be, are already present at this point.  I put in the
color144 disk when prompted, and I login as root and run fdisk.  fdisk
reveals:

     The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1048.
     This is larger than 1024, and may cause problems with some software.
     Using /dev/hda as default device!

I use the p command and learn:

        Device Boot  Begin  Start    End  Blocks   Id  System
     /dev/hda1   *       1      1    305  153688+   6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
     /dev/hda2         306    306    950  325080   83  Linux native
     /dev/hda3         951    951   1048   49392   82  Linux swap

So I quit (I've deleted and recreated the partitions several times to no avail)
and run setup, which warns me throughout the process about my evil,
1048-cylinder drive.  I use Addswap to set up the swap partitions, and setup
correctly finds /dev/hda3, adds it, and activates the swap partition.  It
claims that the following will be added to my /etc/fstab:

     /dev/hda3     swap     swap     defaults

I move on to TARGET setup, and it properly sees /dev/hda2, so I tell it to
place ext2 on it.  Though I've done it several times each way, I choose the
full bad-block-checking format, and tell it to use 1 inode per 4096 bytes (is
this a good idea, btw?!).  It says it's formatting /dev/hda2 with 325080 worth
of 1k blocks, filesystem type ext2, and the proper inode density (1/4096). 
When this lengthy process completes, setup asks if I wish to make /dev/hda1
visible from Linux; I say, sure!  I tell setup to mount /dev/hda1 at /dosc
(which worked fine before...).  It claims that it has added my DOS partion to
/etc/fstab:

     /dev/hda1     /dosc     msdos     defaults

Then comes the part that worked fine the first time around, but no longer does:
 setup prompts for where to install from; I select " 1  Install from a hard
drive partition" -- and pick, of course, /dev/hda1 for the partition where the
sources are.  The sources were in C:\SLAKWARE the first time (when this
worked), however they're now in C:\PACKAGES.  So I dutifully type in /packages
as the source directory, as I remember typing /slakware the first time (when it
worked).  I select "1  FAT..." for the source partition's filesystem type. 
setup complains,

     There was a problem mounting your partition. Would you like to:
          Restart  Start over
          Ignore   Ignore the error and continue

At this point, I'm at a loss.  I've tried things like

     mount /dev/hda1 /dosc -t msdos

(after a

     mkdir /dosc

because it complained it wasn't there) and Linux says,

     mount: wrong fs type, /dev/hda1 already mounted, /dosc busy, or other
error

Usually at this point there's already an empty /mnt/dosc directory, however
this time there doesn't happen to be one (dunno why).  I just re-ran setup and
this time, it did create a /mnt/dosc, as well as a /mnt/lost+found (both are
empty).  mount never lists /dev/hda1 as being mounted anywhere, BTW.

I've tried variations on the above, and nothing works . . . but it did work the
original time!  ARGH!  Any ideas?  I'm really frustrated and am out of my
depth.  :(  I don't get what I screwed up that wasn't fixed by replacing the
master boot record and starting from scratch!  Thanks in advance!  E-mail
desired, newsgroup note also welcome of course (I read c.o.l.misc and
c.o.l.help, tho' not all the notes of course ;).

Kendall