SAM Linux Desktop - Community Forums

Hi SAM,

I have a odd-ball machine that I would like to install SAM on. This is an AMD Geode processor based box, the design of which was purchased from AMD by DECtop. AMD was going to sell them as AMD internet appliance or some such and, yadda, yadda, yadda, they are now sold online by DECtop for $99.

I have tried, and run many distros (Xubuntu, PClinuxOS minime, Puppy 4.0, Damn Small Linux), and have decided I would like to go with SAM on this machine. The Live CD does a great job of hardware discovery and configuration, particularly in the video and audio areas, where a lot of the others had trouble.

It boots and runs great from the Live cd (SAM 2007 - got it from one of the Linux magazine dvds). When I attempt to install it onto a clean, 10g internal Seagate HD, it can't see the disk. It gives an error something like 'can't find anyplace with room to install'. fdisk -l shows no hd. I have watched the boot process and all seems to go well. In the past I have successfully installed Puppy and DSL on to this drive. All of the other distros see the disk as hda. I have since wiped (zeroed) the disk, and re-installed DSL.

The machine has no optical drive, so I boot the live cd from an external usb cd/dvd rom drive.

One interesting note is that if I plug in an external usb hd (spinning platters) or a usb flash drive, it does see those when booted from the live cd. I thought of removing the internal HD and putting it temporarily in the external usb drive enclosure and trying to install that way, but ... maybe you SAM folks have better idea.

Any Ideas??

Thanks

Brief machine description:
AMD Geode 365Mhz processor; 256M ram (maxed)
10Gig Internal Seagate st310014A IDE hd, USB Keyboard and mouse, USB Ethernet, 4 usb 1.0 ports. The sound and video are discovered as Nat Semiconductor cs5535

I had the same problem with Pclinuxgnome for the installation on an acer aspire 150L but I ended up with an install from sam2007, which booted properly from USB. This guy started any machine til now. So really strange. What are the partitions you have created? Adviced is /, /swap and /home in the sequence.

Hi and thanks for the response.
I had created a primary hda1, w/boot flagged, linux swap hda2, and hda3 home, as suggested. Just to be clear, the live cd does start and run the box just fine, its seeing the hd for installation that is at issue.

Hey man, do you have a
/boot
/swap and
/home
? If yes, where is the / root-partition? Or did I miss something? Without root-partition no install.

yogi

der hat die erste partition mit flag gesetzt, ich weiss nicht, wozu das gut sein soll?

Hi click!

try partitions like this

(I would make it) 5GB
/
(format ext3)

512 MB (or little bit more)
/swap

the rest
/home
(format ext3)


set no flags!
SAM must run than!

Isnt the problem that the hardware couldnt be detected even that root and the others exist?
I think Click wants to tell us that his harddrive is not supported by SAM.

Gregor, but the other Distros went with that HD?

SAM must do it!!

Hi Yogi,
Don't tell the ranger,but I was trying Damn Small Linux (DSL), which had successfully installed on the drive and decided to give SAM another try. So I used dd and fdisk from a terminal with-in DSL to prepare the HD for a SAM install. I thought it would be wise to start fresh. Using fdisk, I prepared the partitions as described above. DSL recognized the disk as hda, so I refer to the blank partitions as hda1(ext2 format), hda2 (type 83, linux swap), hda3 (ext2 for user data). I did not set up any file tree structure at all, as in all of my past experience with linux (some but not a whole lot) the distro does that during the install.

With the blank partitions described above, I put the SAM live cd (dvd?) in and booted up. All seems good with the boot, and the desktop shows up looking great. I click on the install SAM icon and it asks do you want to install to usb hd or internal hd. I say internal and SAM goes hunting for a drive (hda I assume) and says there is no drive with any room to install SAM. You are saying if I put on the structure as you suggest, that will enable SAM to see the drive. I'm game. Forgive me if I was not clear.

Thanks to all for your help.

Gregor, thanks for chiming in, you have stated the problem precisely.
I wonder if you might be on to something. It is an IDE drive and I would think as such, it should be seen. I assumed that IDE was IDE. Maybe the its the controller SAM objects to... I have a couple of other drives somewhere around here. I will dig them up and see if that changes anything.