Installing Linux (DSL)

Submitted by TheKnightsShield on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 12:26
in


Hi,

I'm thinking about installing DSL Linux onto my PC (currently has Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 and a whole load of annoying security updates that are causing problems) and was wondering if someone might be able to offer some help?

I spoke to Ali on YouTube and asked about HDA's and so on, so I have an idea as to what they are now. My next query is this:

How do I know which is which? All I know is that HDA is the primary drive, but if there are partitions (HDA1 and HDA2), I can't just enter HDA in the installation screen. Right? I would imagine I'd lose a whole lot of stuff if I did. So, would I be correct in saying that I need to enter HDA1, to get rid of the Windows installation?

Hope someone out there can help further, I'm getting annoyed with Windows right now, it's causing so many problems it's unbelievable. At present, I can't use 'Add and remove programs' for some unknown reason, so I'm unable to uninstall the security updates. What a joke, huh!!

Thanks for reading.

Chris


OK, so I've now got DSL Linux

Submitted by TheKnightsShield on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 13:14.

OK, so I've now got DSL Linux running on the hard drive, only problem now is, where are all my hard drives?! I have 2 physical hard drives in this PC and 4 partitions in total, but the only one to show up so far is the one Linux is on.

Any ideas on how to go about mounting the rest of the drives?

Chris

Hi Chris, DSL is great for

Submitted by Ali Ross on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 11:25.

Hi Chris,

DSL is great for low-powered or older computers, however it's not as user friendly as some of the larger distributions like Ubuntu. This means it probably doesnt automatically mount the disk for you. If these are windows XP/Vista (NTFS) partitions you want to mount then you can mount them like so from the Terminal, assuming that hdb1 is your Second hard disk, partition one, and that contains what you refer to as your 'C Drive' in windows. You can change the name C_DRIVE to be whatever you like. It's just an example name

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/c_drive

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/c_drive

now you can open a file explorer, or type ls /mnt/c_drive from your terminal window and you should be able to see the files in the partition hdb1 (second disk, partition 1).

To automatically mount /dev/hdb1 each time your computer starts, there is a file in the folder /etc called fstab (file system table). If you edit this file and add a line like so you will be able to have the partition mounted (read only - ro) each time you start your computer.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

add this line to the bottom:

/dev/sda2                                       /mnt/c_drive            ntfs    ro,user        0       0

reboot your system and then it will automatically mount it for you.

Hope this helps,

 

Ali