grist for the installfest mill

[Brian Lintz]

Dear Talk readers,
    Last week a year old installation of Storm linux (which
is Debian based, btw) ailed: xterm would not run, run level
had changed to two, functions, files, and directories could
not be found, most commands would not work. Seemingly about
the only things which worked were logging in and shutdown.
    I had tried to load Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, it seemed to
run well, yet on reboot LILO failed. This concerned me a bit
because I also have Win95 and WinNT on the first partition
and it seemed that I could not access these either. ME wrote
of some suggestions with which I found that my computer would
not cooperate [recalcitrant bugger!] It seemed that I could
not put any distro'f linux on my machine.
    Silly me, I found that I had missed a step to return to
Storm Linux: Change in BIOS the boot sequence from A, C, SCSI
to CDROM, C, A. I then worked to put the StormLinux on the
computer and things seemed to go well at first.
    My partition for linux is 400 MB. [Aside: Can someone
please explain why fdisk and NT both say that it is 400 MB
and both install programs for linux (Caldera and Storm) show
399 MB? Is the "loss" of 1 MB really lost or of any signi-
ficance?] The minimum hard disk space required for installing
StormLinux is 300 MB. I remember that last October when I
first installed The Storm distro I had whittled it down to
324 MB from Storm's "typical" install of about 765 MB.
    That night, try as I could, I could not reduce it below
520 MB. Even sillier of me, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, I just
hoped that all of the times that I had chosen the "None"
button for sets of packages which I did not need nor want,
that those packages would not be loaded and that the final
installation *would* be less than 399 MB and thus fit on
my hard disk drive. After about four minutes of opening
packages and seeing the hard drive LED flash and a bar on
a graph that indicated progress move, I saw the LED change
to steady burning and the par on the graph stop. I gave it
a good forty-five minutes to think about continuing with
the task at hand and then acknowledged failure and turned
off the computer the hard way. Restarting the computer a
minute later I saw that the computer now could not finish
the POST: I read the dismaying message "Primary hard disk
failure." I thought that things looked bad for the hometeam.
    I had decided to take this as a project to the NBLUG
installfest. [BTW, seeing how it is October, could we
combine some aspects of Octoberfest with the installfest?]
For some reason, habit I suppose, I turned on the computer
last night and saw that instead of "Primary hard disk
failure." I read "LI". I then tried reloading StormLinux
and the damp thing took! It installed flawlessly. A few
decisions about what to select for installation created
a mass of files for about 337 MB of disk space. It looks
good; LILO works; and while I have yet to look and find
NT, Win 95 is there and it seems that files and apps are
intact. I am happier for this.
    I am not sure what all this means but I suggest two
things: 1.) Have a positive attitude that if something
similar happens to yours that you have not lost things
and that you can recover them; and B.) Be persistent
about progressing or returning to the task.
    Can someone please explain why a hard disk drive
may at one moment not be found after POST and then
twenty-four hours later is found by POST and is well?
    Sincerely Y.,
    Brian