write permissions for /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

Hey there,

Again I would like to express thanks to all folks who are expressing
interest in this and offering ideas, help, etc.

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Darrell Fleming wrote:

Hi

I have a similar problem, discovered late last night when trying to install
1.4rc1 on an old windows PII system.

Boot CD, fdisk the hda1 (boot) hda2 (swap) and hda3 (/), also hdb1 (usr),
then mke2fs -j on all but swap.  Makes with out errors.  Mount as per
directions, download stage1 tar ball to /mnt/gentoo and untar.  Same errors
at /boot/boot symlink.
 I looked at the /boot partition with df and found it full !!  cd to it and
ls, it was full of windows files !!.  Started again, unmount /boot and
mke2fs -j, mount it and windows files still there.

I then repartitioned the whole hda drive to one partition and shutdown and
rebooted and started again, end result, the windows files are still there in
/boot and the partition is tagged read-only and I can't manually delete
them.

Odd thing is that the old files all were removed correctly on the other
partitions and drives.

The only odd thing about this hd is that it was originally partitioned with
partition magic and this area of the drive was hidden.

I'll be trying again late tonight.

I've successfully installed Gentoo on other systems, all v1.2

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Michael S. Sprague again

ok this is the machine I am trying to run gentoo on:

ABIT AT model AB IT-5H rev 1.01
Award v4.51PG (2A59FA1D)
Pentium MMX CPU at 233
128 sdram pc 100
Hard drive: Fujitsu MPD3084AT 8.43 MB
Hard drive: IBM DCAA-34330 4.3 MB
Adaptec 2930CU scsi card
Ricoh MP6200 cd-rw (scsi)
Plextor 12/20 Plex cd-rw (scsi)
HP Scanjet 3c (scsi)
3com 3C509B-TX XL PCI
Number Nine 9FXMotion 771 video
Voodoo 3DFX Obsidian2 X-24 3d accelerator

NOW: this is similar to experiences I have had using the cfdisk utility
found on the image cd(s). I am wondering if it related to the fact that we
were both attempting to install using machines with older an older bios.

I also found some windows files on one of the hard drives I was using after
performing the cfdisk operation. Please do not attempt to clean off your
drive completely and then reboot it without any partitions configured using
the cfdisk program. I did that, woe is me 8-(, now I have 2 drives that have
no entry in the bios cmos setup and I can't figure out how to return them. I
will get into that in a minute.

After I discovered the windows files I removed all the cfdisk partitions.
Then rebooted to a Win98 Startup disk and ran the Microsoft version of fdisk
supplied on the floppy disk. I deleted all the DOS 6.X partitions on the
disk then rebooted to the image cd a remade the partitions using cfdisk, and
initialized them according to the install instructions. Great, things were
looking better. I could no longer see the windows files.

I did the pci-setup and net-setup eth0 and they worked great. I then made
the directories and mounted them according to the install .html. When I
untarred I got the same error exit message.
tar: ./boot/boot Can not write to '.': Read only filesystem.

This made me believe that either I had to mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
some other way or I had made a mistake and not followed the instructions
properly. I could not believe that I hadn't followed the instructions
properly because I have done it at least 20 times or so in the past 3 days
with the same exit error. So, I thought, "what else could be wrong? Is there
something wrong with the hard drive? Should I switch them around? So I did.

In fact I switched them back and forth several times. Changing one to master
then to slave and vice versa. Also changing there positions on the ide cable
from 0 to 1. I would get errors at boot up from bios that "Primary master
hard drive fail", or "Primary slave hard drive fail" or both depending upon
which position the drives were in on the ide cable. So I checked the bios.

Up to this point I could still see the drives in cfdisk when booting form
the image cd. At this point in time both of the drives had all of their
partitions removed from the Microsoft fdisk program and all of their
partitions removed using the cfdisk program on the image cd. I had rebooted
a few times to update the drive tables and could still see them in cfdisk
and fdisk even though they were bare.

I realized that the reason I was getting the "Primary master hard drive
fail" and "Primary slave hard drive fail" messages was due to the bios
settings now being reversed, so I decided to reverse them in bios.

When I entered the new settings into bios and rebooted I could no longer see
either of the drives. I believe that if I had at least one partition from
either fdisk or cfdisk on I would have been ok. I have not been able to
recover them as of yet. So, whatever you do, don't change your bios settings
if your don't have any partitions on the drive. It will become
unrecognizable to the bios. I may be able to put them into another machine
with a newer bios and let them be auto detected, not too sure about this
one. If they are ok I should be able to format using the Microsoft fdisk
program and put them back into the Linux box after they have had some thing
put on them so the older bios can see it.

Michael S. Sprague
[email protected]
Registered Linux User: 290220

"Wisdom pretended is folly maintained,
Ignorance admitted is wisdom begun,,,"