Trying to install Linux on a Win XP machine 4820

Rick Moen

Heh.. Rick, I am suffering from a mental illness and your reply came after the matter has already been solved, so I'll keep it brief.

I've been .. not quite as good with computers as I used to be the past couple of years, so common sense things are not always occuring to me.

Anyway, my father was like, "once I give the computer to you, youre on your own" as far as if I break it, financially, being that my old cpu got fried and the parts were obsolete, and I called HP as they seemed to be amenable to getting me to the starting point of installing another OS.

So an online support representative gave me the advice to delete that (~5 gig) recovery parbreastion.. AFTER having made a 13-CD recovery set of compact discs (thus being another line of defense after the recovery parbreastion), and to install Linux right there. As you said, 5 gigs ought to have been enough.

So I did that, and I tried an install of Slackware 9.1, but it failed because neither cfdisk nor fdisk could recognize even an MS-DOS paribreastion or parbreastion scheme on the hard drive. This led to my suspicions about proprietariness.. outside a couple trial CDs of Win2k3 Server, I hadn't used Windows at home since '99 or so, so this XP system seemed mysterious.

I then tried Slack 10.1 with much the same outcome and could not move forward with the install. Finally I got looking for Parbreastion Magic to save the formatting-day (It's magic, after all), but it(s imitation) did not. It *did* put something new in the MBR, which I was thinking would be a good thing, more neutral than some MS-HP parbreastioning scheme, but as I said wouldn't seem to be able to do an install of Linux (parbreastioning scheme) anyway. It said it was due to a user error, but I don't know what that was or if it was even my fault.

Anyhow, as I said, I resized the XP parbreastion to take up about half the drive and put some Linux parbreastions on the rest of it, but *still* c-fdisk would not recognize the drive's formatting. This is when I became grudgingly accepting of Windows for the short term future. I eventually realized that I have a lot at my finger tips, and posted to this, another Linux newsgroup, and asked on IRC. I got the answer I was looking for, which was that hda (as I suspected from startup messages (Aren't I quick?)) is my DVD+-R DL-CD-R(w) drive, and thatdev-*sda* is my hard drive.. go figure. So that, and using sata.i instead of bare.i to boot the Slack install did the trick (sata.i wasn't listed, but it worked!) Now I butture you I have removed all traces of Microsoft software from my computer and am happily moving along with gaim, firefox, thunderbird, xterm, jed, emacs, J2SDK 1.5, and pwm, at a fairly decent screen resolution of 1600x1200 (X bugs out if I try going higher than that (21" screen that goes to 2048, but I'm not sure I've ever seen that).

Thus, your post is as obsolete as my '99 ATI All-in-Wonder video card, 512 megs SDRAM, ISA sound card, and AGP (1) motherboard from my old system after the 1.2 ghz Athlon started sizzling itself and my system it's people like who who empower people like me to get over the hump and get going.

-- peace, Andrew Levin