Partitioning Your Hard Disk Before Installing SUSE
Scott Morris shares a solution he provided for a user on how to partition a hard disk before installing SUSE.
Problem:
I’ve found an interesting bug during installation of SuSE 10.2 on
a machine which has previously run 9.3 perfectly well.
I’m using an HDD which has previously had Windows on it, but
has subsequently been formatted.
During the installation process, I get the error “Your computer
does not have enough memory to run YaST. To continue, activate some
swap space” and then invites me to enter partition details on the
HDD for a swap partition.
Problem is, it hasn’t yet initialised the HDD for Linux use.
I’m sure that all other versions of Linux which I’ve used (SuSE 9.1
and 9.3, and RH (various versions from about 7.1 onwards) have gone thru
a disk initialisation phase before demanding swap space! The HDD is
definitely visible in System Info -> Hard disks with its correct
size and everything.
(How) can I get 10.2 to format the disk first?
Solution:
When you first insert the disc and boot from it, you are taken to the
beginning of the installation process where you select a language.
When you get here, press CTRL+ALT+F2, and you are taken to a virtual
terminal.
Once there, run this command:
cat /proc/partitions
I’m guessing you will see something like this:
major minor #blocks name 3 0 195360984 hda 3 1 40131 hda1 3 2 1959930 hda2 3 3 29302560 hda3 3 4 164055780 hda4
You would then become ‘su’ and run fdisk:
su Password: [enter root password here] fdisk /dev/hda
This takes you to the fdisk app which you can use to wipe your partition
table. You’ll see something like this:
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 24321. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): Press 'p' to print out your partition table: Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/hda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 5 40131 83 Linux /dev/hda2 6 249 1959930 82Linux swap / Solaris/dev/hda3 250 3897 29302560 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 3898 24321 164055780 83 LinuxCommand (m for help):
Yours will *VERY* likely look different.
press ‘d’ to delete each partition.
When you are done, press ‘w’ to write the partitioning table to the HDD.
Then, reboot the computer, and try installing openSUSE again.
Hope this works out for you.
Scott Morris
http://www.suseblog.com/(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)
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