Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[heywoodj]

I've been using Puppy for several years now on various machines and have had no particular problem with installation until now.

It's a Dell desktop with reasonable specs (2.8 GHz, 512 MB, 40 GB), but I'm having problems with the Universal Installer for 4.2.1. When the installer looks at the hard drive, it says the disk is unallocated.

The installer will allow me to install by treating the disk as a "Super Floppy". That's not what I want.


In fact the disk has many, perhaps too many partitions. Primary partitions sda1, sda2 and sda3 are (unfortunately) taken up with XP and associated Dell stuff.

Partition sda4 is split into a ext2 and a swap logical partitions.

Looking at the disk with Gparted 0.3.3 from Puppy 4.2.1 also shows the disk to be unallocated.

However the Wary 5.2.2 installer will see the partitions, as will the GParted 0.8

My main reason for using such an old Puppy is that I need Conextant HCF modem support, something I can't seem to get with the newer ones including the Warys.

So, I guess my main question is how can the 4.2.1 installer be made to see the hard drive partitions properly?

[heywoodj]

An update: thinking the problem was the presence of an extended partition, sda4, with logical partitions (sda5 and sda6), I wiped out the logical partitions and the extended partition using Gparted 0.9.0 on Hiren's Boot CD.

Still no joy 4.2.1's installer and Gparted 0.3.3 still sees the whole drive as unallocated space.

Then I booted using a Slacko 5.3.1 CD and used the Gparted there to make a blank primary ext2 partition, sda4.

4.2.1 installer still sees the whole disk as unallocated space. What's going on? And how do I work around this?

Can I manually copy the files in / to a mounted sda4 or something like that? Or is that asking for trouble?

Thanks.

[bigpup]

[heywoodj]

bigpup,
Thanks for your input, but my problem is not with Gparted, per se. The problem is that although I can use other Gparted to create whatever partitions I desire, I cannot get the 4.2.1 installer (and incidentally GParted 0.3.3) to recognize the existence of of those partitions.

I did look at that post, http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=1161.
Running:

[mini-jaguar]

Not that it's necessarily related to your specific problem, but I tried 4.2.1 in a computer that is not too old, say 5 years old, and I think it wouldn't even boot or something (I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but it wasn't working correctly). Then I tried the retro version of 4.2.1 and it worked fine.

[heywoodj]