Problems with partitions & network cards

[Memphisto]

I have a new system that I am setting up with dual boot Win98SE (games)& Red Hat 7.1

The system is an MSI K7T Turbo LE, 256MB PC150 SDRAM, 40GB 7200rpm Quantum HDD, GeForce IIMX card & 2 x el cheapo Realtek rtl8139 10/100 network cards.

When I set the system up I created one primary DOS partition (hda1) of 5GB for Win98SE and one extended DOS partition of 30GB (hda5) for my files. Win98SE was set up first.

Red Hat 7.1 was installed next. Most times I try to create a partition with Disk Druid I get an error message saying >1024 sectors with the partition I am trying to create coming up as red. The first one I try to create is /boot of 64MB. When I create the /swap partition of 128MB, it gets created OK. The / partition gets created fine as well. If I try to create a /home partition, this causes the / and /home to show up as red. Really wierd ****!

What I end up doing is leaving it as the /boot (red) with no assigned space, /swap of 128MB and / with all remaining space (4+GB). Everything installs fine and RH is up and running.

In my reading (I am actually reading the manuals and boards :eek: ) I have found out that the /boot is not necessary, however, unless I try to create this partition, I cannot go any further into the installation process of RH. If I go back to re-install RH it only shows the /swap and / partitions along with the FAT32's. No /boot.

Can anyone tell me why I am getting these problems when I try to create a /boot partition and when I try to create a /home partition and others???

Next comes the network cards. RH does recognise them (I think!) as it prompts me to configure eth0 and eth1. The first is for my cable modem and the other is for my LAN. I click on the option for DHCP for eth0 and enter in the IP details for eth1. Installation continues...

During the first and subsequent reboots, eth0 and eth1 fail! A friend suggested not to try and configure the cards during the RH installation process but instead configure with Linuxconf. So far I am just hacking around because I really don't fully understand what I am doing :) .

Does anyone have any experience with a similar setup and is able to offer me some tips and strategies for the installation process.

Thanking you in advance.

[PimpHolic]

im not sure if this works in red hat, does in slack run this command :

netconfig
and see if that makes any difference

or u could always edit files in /etc
read up a bit on it, its actually pretty easy

[error27]

In future can you break your posts up into different posts for each question? But since this is your second time posting it is ok.

type: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
type: /sbin/ifconfig eth1 uptype: /sbin/ifconfig

Does is show a section for eth0, eth1 and lo?

If so that means that your ethernet card is recognized by the kernel.

Tell us when you get that far and we can help you with the next step.

[error27]

About the /home partition, I say just don't create a /home at all. Just have a big / and leave it at that.

Mind you I have never installed Red Hat and the installation may not like it when you try that. But theoretically you really don't need to worry about a /home at all.

[Memphisto]

Originally posted by PimpHolic:
<STRONG>im not sure if this works in red hat, does in slack run this command :

netconfig
and see if that makes any difference

or u could always edit files in /etc
read up a bit on it, its actually pretty easy</STRONG>

Netconfig works. As for the reading - can you specify a few files to read up on in /etc? I'm trying everything one file at a time! Unfortunately there tends to be three completely different ways to do everything. Quite confusing until I get the hang of it.

[Memphisto]

Originally posted by error27:
<STRONG>In future can you break your posts up into different posts for each question? But since this is your second time posting it is ok.

type: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
type: /sbin/ifconfig eth1 uptype: /sbin/ifconfig

Does is show a section for eth0, eth1 and lo?

If so that means that your ethernet card is recognized by the kernel.

Tell us when you get that far and we can help you with the next step.</STRONG>

I'll give this a go when I get home. Thanks.

[Memphisto]

Originally posted by error27:
<STRONG>About the /home partition, I say just don't create a /home at all. Just have a big / and leave it at that.

Mind you I have never installed Red Hat and the installation may not like it when you try that. But theoretically you really don't need to worry about a /home at all.</STRONG>

I was told that its good practice to have separate partitions for /, /usr, /home & /var. This is for security and maintenance purposes???

At present I have the big ol /

[Lem Sip]

Hey Mephisto

I've just gone through a lot of the same things you're trying to cope with :)

In fact Error27 helped me a lot with some similar questions I had to yours.

Being a Windoze user for so long I was totally lost on how to do any hardware config. I was asking how to assign IRQ's and I/O addresses etc and couldn't get anywhere.

My network card is an RTL 8029 and although RH knew it was there it refused to load the driver for that, my sound card and nothing would mount.

All of my problems were fixed by recompiling the kernel. It sounds hard and nasty but the truth is that it took only about 8 lines of code to do and maybe 45 minutes (including reading). Oh, I didn't use modules for the sound and network drivers either. I figured I'd be better served by enabling modules but compiling the drivers into the kernel because it takes less configuration.

Here's the link I used - I found it while looking up the Kernel Howto's on RedHat's site:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO-2.html


The RH 7.1 install seemed pretty lame for P+P to me and I have a standard system with IDE drives and a PIII processor etc. But now that I've done the whole compile thing I feel well rewarded and it is enlightening. Mind you, I haven't done anything more than install and compile the kernel on my duel booting WinMe/RH 7.1 box but the satisfaction of what I have achieved is incredible!!

I'm finally surfing here in my RH 7.1 with sound and network running and I haven't used Windows since I worked out how to connect my RH 7.1 through my Win98 Internet Connection Sharing box with dial up. It's easy to do with DHCP on Win9x. My next project is to make redhat my internet server and gateway rather than using ICS :)

Oh, and regarding partitions - I never bothered to make an extended partition for Linux, I created a 4GB Fat 32 partition for WinME on a 6GB HDD and then installed Linux entirely on another HDD on the same machine leaving 2 GB spare on the first disk that I am not sure what to do with. I also only created a large / mount point and swap space.

I also found that I was reinstalling Linux in the hope that the hardware would get detected "this" time as happens in Windows. This meant I was installing both OSes a lot while I tried to tweak the settings so I creeated install scripts for installing Windows without having to press a key or anything, if anyone would like a copy of those scripts then let me know because I'm buggered if I'm gonna repartition, reinstall and then get all my lost data back.

Anyway that's what I did and it has helped me no end. Thank you Linux :P

Lem

[Lem Sip]

Oh and regarding partitions on duel boot machines...

I did a lot of my PC configuration from a Windows boot disk - created from the control panel/Add/Remove Programs/Create boot disk.

This allowed me to load generic CD drivers and I could install by running autoboot.

The problem with this was that M$'s version of FDisk won't delete extended partitions created with disk druid - it won't delete the swap partitions.

I fixed this problem by downloading AEFdisk which is a truly helpful shareware program that can be found on www.download.com (http://www.download.com) and then extracted onto that floppy disk for deleting those pesky partitions.

Lem

[Memphisto]

Alright, my cards are recognised!

Its being a little screwy with eth0 during boot up showing that it has failed???

[error27]

&gt;&gt;Alright, my cards are recognised!

So your connection is working now? Out of curiosity can you type this?

"dmesg | grep eth"

and as root: "lsmod"

could you post the results?

[error27]

If you have a system with 100's of users then it's nice to have /home partitioned off. You could back up that harddrive every night.

There are various other boring things yuo could do with that partition scheme if you wanted to... At school I think I'm going to see if we could create a /var partition that would be mounted read write. Then we could mount the / partition as read only. That way when people press the reset button it wouldn't destroy the / partition.

Basically, it's not a big deal...

[Memphisto]

Cable is working! Alex dances a little jig on the spot :) .

Can anyone answer this...

Why is everything in Linux at least 3 days worth of reading and approximately four words and characters to get working? Ahhhhhh!

The feeling you get when it works is soooo worth it though!

This is what I think I did...

When configuring the cards during setup I entered the following details for eth0:

DHCP selected
Hostname
IP for DNS servers
8139too for the network card

During subsequent boots, eth0 failed to establish an IP address.

This morning I typed in what error27 suggested...

type: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
type: /sbin/ifconfig eth1 uptype: /sbin/ifconfig

This showed up a bit of info that quickly made a wooshing sound over my head. Network cards are there and obviously recognised.

I used linuxconf to change the IP address I had entered during installation to the IP of the DHCP server. From a guide I had read I typed the following...

#/sbin/dhcpcd -h C*******-A

Clicked on Konqueror and hey presto - internet works!

Can someone please explain exactly what that last line I typed in did?

Thanks to everyone who have contributed. Now all I have to do is start showing my partner. She has enough trouble with Windows98 as it is!

[error27]

good deal.

the last line means that you are getting a dynamic ip address (it may not change but it's given automatically so it could).

you enterred your host name. but i'm confused by all the asterixes.

congratz. :)

[Memphisto]

Thats my hostname ie. "CO-1234567-A"

For some reason I am under the impression that the hostname is the method used for authenticating. So should someone else get it, they could be recieving free cable???

Never asked much about the hostname. Does my service provider use any other form of authentication such as IP etc.? Am I being overly conscientious? I'm just as new to the world of cable internet as I am to Linux :o

Getting there though!

[error27]

I was actually joking about your hostname. I knew you put asterixes through it on purpose.

But it's not important or used for authentication.

If you leave it off then they will probably set your host name up automatically. (depending on how they have it set up of course)

[Memphisto]

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the line...

# /sbin/dhcpcd -h CO1234567-A

doing? I have since discovered that it is necessary to type this line in as root every time I log back in. Is there a way to automatically feed this information in whenever the system boots?