the joy of installing linux

Thursday, October 19, 2000, at 02:07PM

By Eric Richardson

So I'm trying to install Redhat 6.2 on an old 486 with a 420mb hd. Theoretically, that shouldn't be a problem. I've had Linux on the thing before (X and enightenment, even). Not so, however.

fdisk refused to autodetect the number of cylinders right, so I had to manually set that and then partition over its whining. Then the format step flies by way to fast to have actually formatted anything, so I flip over to the console prompt to see what's going on. I end up mounting /dev/hda2 (my newly partitioned root device) into /tmp, and then find the contents of some ancient install that I really don't recognize. I don't know what I did with this drive last, but it obviously was something between it being our home computer and now.

Weird.

In any case, I couldn't get the partition to format. Apparently /dev/hda2 decided to exist for mounting, but not for anything else. Hopefully a mount and rm -r * will do the trick.

Back to work...