Ok, so I got a /slightly/ different CPi now. Fellow on my other forum was kind enough to give me his; it's the same model, the difference is that his had a bad keyboard, its original HDD, and both RAM slots work.
Fixed the keyboard since I now had a parts machine -- I just swapped in mine. Whatever.
I'm now running a CF drive in there, actual solid state tech, none of this microdrive crunk like I was doing before. I really don't trust a hard drive from 1999 to be still in perfect shape -- particularly since it seems to be randomly making a rattling noise. I've got it plugged in to see what was on it besides a botched Vector Linux install that the previous owner told me about.
I've managed to install Puplite5 to the drive. However, I've got three questions...
One, I cannot for the life of me get a full install to work on this POS. It absolutely /refuses/ to boot in anything other than read-only mode, even with the boot flag set. WTH?! I suspect it may have something to do with my insisting that it live on ext3 -- it seems to misdetect it as ext2fs. Hmm
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)
Two, is it safe to run swap on this card? It's a Sandisk ExtremeIII 4gb whosamadoober that can apparently do everything except deliver pizza. I'd like to have some swap-space simply because this system only has 128mb RAM and after booting there's about 16mb of it left for everything else
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
Three, why the dickens is it impossible to format a hard drive to have a swap partition using anything older than a /recent/ series-5 Puppy? Gparted errors out every single blasted time, and I wind up with an "unrecognized filesystem" on the relevant partition. This is not isolated to Puplite5 at all! I've seen it several times before... IIRC Wary 511 had the same problem. Back then I knew where my Gparted LiveCD was, of course...
Help me folks!