Hi. I would like to install FC2 on my new machine. I recently put it together out of a 13 GB IDE drive and an ECS Athlon MB from Fry's. I needed to install RedHat 7.3, and it was quite difficult. The installation itself went OK, but the machine would not boot from either a floppy or from the IDE hard drive. It would boot in rescue mode with the CDROM, but even chroot'ing, this was not a practical workable solution. So, I searched google with regard to the ECS motherboard, and found a lot of posts detailing similar issues. Although the information from the posts was sort of fragmented and contradictory, it indicated that nobody tried using a bootable SCSI drive. I had a 2 GB surplus drive and an Adaptec 2940UW card sitting around. Obviously, without these items sitting around, it would be foolish to purchase these items, since the card costs more than a new motherboard. The motherboard had been sitting around too long for Fry's to accept a return, and the support at ECS Elitegroup stalled and put me on e-mail tech support hold to resolve the issue. This method worked a little bit. The SCSI disk was too small for a full install, and even with the install that I wanted (kernel source, etc.), it placed drivers in /usr. This was devastating to me, since I could not try the remount trick. So, I went with a minimal install, intending to upgrade later. The install went well, and the machine would boot off the SCSI. Also, I could see the IDE drive partitions (once the system had booted). This setup would not have worked for a practical system, since I needed dual boot capability for a killer app that only ran under 7.3, and a more modern distro, such as FC2. It was not possible to place a monolithic root partition on the SCSI drive, since it is too small. It is even too small for the full (required) RedHat 7.3 install. To expand the size, I got the wild idea to reformat one of the partitions on the large IDE drive, and cp -r the contents of /usr (the largest directory) to the IDE partition. Then, I would place an entry in the /etc/fstab with the /dev/hda1 partition as /usr, and mount it with a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit near the mount -f / line. Of course, there would be a brutal moment after doing an rm -rf /usr/* , but after rebooting and remounting, everything should be OK. It was not OK. Once /usr/* was removed, the OS started behaving unpredictably. The GUI went down, and I was left with a text screen. Then, the reboot hung, and I had to hit the power switch. Fortunately, this ATX power supply has a hard power switch (the soft switch becomes inoperative). After the restart, there were a huge number of error messages, and the OS started a text login session. With the init respawning something dependent on /usr, the screen flashed intermittently, so it was hard to edit and enter commands. But, finally, I realized that the mount commands in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit were red herrings. I could just kick the ass of the idiot who put in these misleading lines. The message "Mounting local filesystems" that appears during boot gives the real location for putting the mount /usr command. After doing this and rebooting, the machine came up fine and was usable, if a little weakly enabled from the minimal install. So, things are at the state of one monolithic / partition on the SCSI drive which is mostly empty, due to the transfer of /usr. Then, there are plenty of empty partitions and space on the IDE drive. The reason that I could not do this tricky install from entirely within Anaconda is that only the SCSI driver appeared while installing, even though the IDE drive was at all times accessible. I could just kick the ass of the idiot who put in this limitation. In order to install FC2, this partition will have to be resized (defragged and compacted) so that it takes up less space. Then, a new, smaller root partition must be installed, on the SCSI, not the IDE, lest it not be bootable. The /usr, or even better, everything but the /boot should go to the IDE drive. Either an inability to see the IDE drive, or a refusal to install on more than one disk at a time would blow me out of the water. Also, any flakyness or hiccups of parted (which FC2 is supposed to employ during installation) would likewise make the install difficult. I checked the FC2 FAQ's and docs, but did not see anything relating to this matter. Does anyone have any experience/insight regarding these issues? Thanks, Lin __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/
