Harddisc-Installation fails: GRUB loads only black screen

[Nyks]

Hello!

I wanted to use a 450 Mhz-PC with 64 MB RAM as a desktop-PC with a small linux (which is the only OS on this PC).

After booting "puppy-2.13-seamonkey-fulldrivers" with Xorg from bootable live-CD, it works fine.
My 8 GB-HD was empty, partitioned with cfdisk into 2 partitions (82=linux).
I installed Puppy with "Menu / Setup / ... installation / on internal HD IDE-ATA". Normal installation (not "coexist"), on hda1@ext2.
Using: GRUP with option MBR (as suggested), installed on hda1 and additionally on floppy.

Now, when start my PC from HD, GRUB loads, and asks wether to boot "Linux from HDA1" or "Linux from HDA2" (see the second screenshot - its a digicam-photo ).

When i hit ENTER on Linux-HDA1, i get a completely black screen and nothing happens.

For your information: The first screenshot shows the information, when I hit 'e' on Linux-HDA1.

Whats trong?

Best regards,
Jan

PS: I'm a really Linux-Noobie ... its my first installation of linux, so plz dont deal so severely with me

[GuestToo]

maybe the vga=769 is causing trouble ... try pressing e when you boot, edit the line and delete the vga=769 and press enter to boot Puppy ... if it boots ok, you can delete the vga=769 from the menu.lst file

is vmlinuz in the correct place? (in /boot on hda1) ... try pressing c when you boot, then type at the Grub command line:

root (hd0,0)
find /boot/vmlinuz

it should find it on (hd0,0) ... it might be located on /vmlinuz

or the problem may not be with Grub

[muggins]

also, did you create a swap partition?

(82=linux).

82 is for swap.

like you, i've got 64M ram, but i then created a 200M swap partition. if you haven't created one, just use your boot cdrom to boot in ram only, then use gparted.

[Nyks]

hm, i tried to use your hints, and removed the vga=... without success.

Then I rebooted from CD again, used "Gparted Partition manager", deleted the paritions, created them again as ext-2, and formated hda-1.

Now i installed Puppy again to internal IDE-ATA-HD with the "universal puppy installer".

I used the same options like before.

Then, shutdown, and "save settings to HD" (in the installation before I choosed "do not save".

Now it works

Strange ... the only differences between first and second try was, that i formated now with "Gparted PM", before I used cfdisk. And after power-off the live-boot (from which i installed it), i choose "save2HD" instead of "do not save".

[WhoDo]

Strange ... the only differences between first and second try was, that i formated now with "Gparted PM", before I used cfdisk. And after power-off the live-boot (from which i installed it), i choose "save2HD" instead of "do not save".

cfdisk doesn't make that partition bootable by default. You have to elect to make it bootable before writing the partition info to the drive. OTOH, Gparted automatically makes the partition bootable. Perhaps that was the problem?

[Nyks]

I dont think so; cfdisk warnt me with a dialog-box, that no BOOT-flag was set; so i corrected this before apply the changes.

Grub was started correctly, so i assumed that boot(-sector) was OK.

But perhaps i did this or another mistakes while partitioning/formating.

Now its running fine (although Seamonkey is reallly (!) slow with multiple open tabs), and Dillo seems to have strange html-rendering.

I havent got created an swap-partition; hda2 is ext-2 (linux), unused, ~3 gig.

hda1 is 5 GB and contains puppy (puppy show "4,9G" free memoney in systemtray).

Do i need to create a swap manually?

[WhoDo]

I havent got created an swap-partition; hda2 is ext-2 (linux), unused, ~3 gig.

hda1 is 5 GB and contains puppy (puppy show "4,9G" free memoney in systemtray).

Do i need to create a swap manually?

Yes. Use Gparted from the Control Panel menu option. How big depends on RAM so in your case 128Mb to 256Mb is plenty.

Choices for faster browsing are Opera 9.10 from the Puppy Software Installer (PSI) repos, and Swiftfox processor-specific Firefox from the web. Either is pretty darn quick, but Opera includes a mail client like Seamonkey and Swiftfox would need Thunderbird installed separately.

Hope that helps

[GuestToo]

you can create a swap file if you would rather not partition the drive

[eMeRy]

I also suggest swapfile than swap partition. If you want to create a 128M one please follow this:

In terminal type:

#dd if=dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=131077

This will create a swapfile to your / directory.

#mkswap /swapfile

Then put this line to rc.local:

swapon /swapfile

After next boot you'll have swapfile.