install pclinuxos onto new hardrive

[jim-in-kansas]

How do I install pclinuxos onto a hard drive that has been reformatted?
unetbootin then gparted then hd install?

installed to my netbook but have slept since then 

this is for a desktop and will install V-box to run XP and win7
programs at my office if successful

Jim Douglass
Garden City

[menotu]

Hi Jim

You can either format and partition your hard drive prior to the install using something like a GParted LiveCD or you can do the formatting and partitioning directly from the PCLinuxOS LiveCD.

My preference was always to use GParted and setup my disk as I wanted before the install but being a bit more proficient I do it from the PCLinuxOS LiveCD.

There are various partitioning setups but a fairly common one is having 3 partitions - i.e

/root partition
swap partition
/home partition

Partition size depends on the size of your hard drive of course.

Additionally you may want to consider making a fourth partition which can be used as for data backup (can be formatted as NTFS if you share stuff with Windows)

[jim-in-kansas]

Went thru the process several times now. liveCD GpartD. with the partitions \root then swap then \home and this last time with \home and also a 10Gig ntfs partition.
Have tried two different liveCD disks downloaded at different dates this year and they all seem to operate the same. 
the liveCD loads and I go thru the install pclinuxos on this machine and have done the reformat disk and install system on HDD.
begins the process then the screen goes black and the CD continues the flash activity but I never see the HDD activity light go on in the normal fashion of data transfer.
I then have given up and pressed the on/off switch and machine comes alive and tells me the install has failed USB device busy. etc.

ßThis time I have just left the machine untouched for over an hour so far to see if there is some magic I have overlooked.
I even ran the RAM memory testing sequence on GpartD for an hour to make sure the RAM was behaving. Appeared to be OK.

I am stumped. I have been using and fixing and dinking with personal computers since the early 1980's. This kind of problem, once overcome, will actually be trivial ....... aren't they all??

Jim

[Old-Polack]

Went thru the process several times now. liveCD GpartD. with the partitions \root then swap then \home and this last time with \home and also a 10Gig ntfs partition.
Have tried two different liveCD disks downloaded at different dates this year and they all seem to operate the same.  
the liveCD loads and I go thru the install pclinuxos on this machine and have done the reformat disk and install system on HDD.
begins the process then the screen goes black and the CD continues the flash activity but I never see the HDD activity light go on in the normal fashion of data transfer.
I then have given up and pressed the on/off switch and machine comes alive and tells me the install has failed USB device busy. etc.

ßThis time I have just left the machine untouched for over an hour so far to see if there is some magic I have overlooked.
I even ran the RAM memory testing sequence on GpartD for an hour to make sure the RAM was behaving. Appeared to be OK.

I am stumped. I have been using and fixing and dinking with personal computers since the early 1980's. This kind of problem, once overcome, will actually be trivial ....... aren't they all??

Jim

I don't know if your problem is here in the forum, translating what you think you've done, or if the error is actually that you've done what you've said.

There is no such thing as a /root partition. There is a / partition, and it needs to be present, as that is where your installation exists.

If you designate improper mount points for your various partitions, the system simply can't run.

[jim-in-kansas]

Well I am doing something wrong for sure. I just reinstalled windows on the hard drive and inserted the liveCD and asked to install pclinuxos on the hard drive using the existing partition. This went through the process to installing the pclinuxos on my hard drive the install dialog box show about 5-10% completion and then the screen went black and the CD drive showed activity for several minutes without any HD activity. I hit the on/off button and the screen came back up with information:
turning off swap: [ok]
-f mount:/mnt/install/proc: devise is busy
umount:/mnt/install: device is busy
 in some cases useful info found about preocesses is found lsof( or fuser(1)  [failed]

This is what has occurred each time I have attempted to install pclos.

Windows XP comes back after reboot. I am thinking I have a hardware problem in that this is a ten year old Dell pc that the current bios does not support boot via usb. That should not be an issue with this installation. I am stumped. I have another Dell pc of the same vintage that I am reluctant to try this on until this issue is resolved.

James Douglass
Garden City, Kansas

[menotu]

You could try running the iso directly in Virtualbox and see if that works okay. If it does, then try the CD.

What spec is the Dell?

Have you managed to boot to the LiveCD desktop instead of using the initial menu install option? Could mebbe then try the install from the desktop.

[jim-in-kansas]

Thanks for the speedy reply
I have always booted the liveCD and tried the install from the live desktop. Sorry I was not more specific.
As Don Rumsfeld said "We don't know what we don't know".
I have always used the liveCD and attempted to run the install from the live desktop. This is with both a clean(no os) HDD and with WinXP installed. same result.

Jim Douglass

[pirate]

from the live cd as root

do this cmd--fdisk -l

[Bald Brick]

jim-in-kansas,

To me this thread is confusing. So:

1.
First of all you must decide how to partition your drive.

I take it that you only want to install Linux on it? Then what you actually need is just a root partition (mounted at /) and possibly a swap partition.

Note that the root directory (/), which contains everything on the root partition is not the same thing as the /root directory, which is a subdirectory of / and simply the home directory of the root user, a.k.a. the super user or administrator.

2.
An old rule of thumb has for a very long time been that you should create a swap partition that is twice as large as your physical memory. As Old-Polack has pointed out this is still true if you intend to use hibernate on a laptop (or even on a desktop). If you don't and have enough RAM, the size of the swap partition can be radically reduced. If you have more than 4GB of RAM you will only need a swap partition in very rare circumstances; if you have 8GB you probably won't ever need it.

3.
Many users also create a /home partition because by simply not reformatting it they they can retain everything in it if they have to reinstall.

4.
The problem is that by default both your personal settings and your personal data will go into /home/<yourname>. And you might want to keep your data somewhere else. If so you can create a separate data partition, in which case you can let your home partition be overwritten without loosing your photos, text files, music or films.

Some people mount their data partitions on a /Data directory that they create immediately under /. This is not very standards-compliant, so unless you have several users that need access to the directory you should probably create a mountpoint under your home directory.

5.
Traditionally many other directories have been on their own partitions. This is usually not relevant in PCLinuxOS.

6.
But how large should the partitions be? If you have a separate /home partition PCLinuxOS will work well with a root partition of 5GB although 10GB would give you more elbow space. Personally I've managed to fill 30GB, but I love installing and experimenting with all kinds of programs, so I think this should be an upper limit.

If you don't have a separate partition for your data your /home partition can't be too large; if you do have a separate data partition you could just let /home be a subdirectory on a 10GB root partition (/).

For the size of the swap partition, see above.

7.
The actual partitioning can be done in numerous ways. Like many forum members I like to use gparted but diskdrake (which the installation program uses) works quite well.

8.
In your second post you talked about \root and \home, and Old-Polack pointed out that the /root directory isn't usually on its own partition. To that I'd want to add that \ is only used as a symbol for the root directory and as a separator between folders and subfolders in Windows and DOS. In Linux it's just an escape character: it indicates that the following character should be interpreted literally. "\" in Windows is "/" in Linux and other Unix-like systems. (Gates couldn't even get that right.)

[jim-in-kansas]

Thanks.

Apparently I need to get the book out and do some re-reading of Linux for Dummies!! Been trying to do too many thing here at the office and at home.

Probably need to throttle back and finish a couple of open projects before I jump back into this.

Jim Douglass
Garden City, Kansas
 

[Bald Brick]

Thanks.

Apparently I need to get the book out and do some re-reading of Linux for Dummies!! Been trying to do too many thing here at the office and at home.

Probably need to throttle back and finish a couple of open projects before I jump back into this.

Jim Douglass
Garden City, Kansas
 

Don't give up.

You'll soon find that if you just stick to the default you'll surprisingly often be all right in PCLinuxOS. Just don't try to change any settings before you know what you do. And if you feel that something isn't right and has to be changed, post and ask for advice on the forum. But remember to tell us precisely what you've done or are about to do. And give us all error messages word by word.

In no time you'll know more about Linux than you ever thought you would.