Linux woes

I was talking to a friend at 2600 and found out that he worked for Dell.
I thought that I might as well ask if he could get my laptop that I purchased some 5+ years ago put it my name. At the moment, Dell think the machine is stolen and won’t give me a replacement power adapter from the crap batch that release long ago.

I had a look at his site and seen that it was pretty crappy, and asked him what was going on with it. He said he put it together it 2 minutes and wasn’t very proud of it. So I started throwing something together in PHP. His current site was in asp. My plan was to write in PHP, change stuff over to ASP and hand it to him and hope there would only be minor changes required.
My next thought was blow it. Mono does asp (I refuse to use IIS any more), I’ll get that going.
Downloaded, installed. Works ok standalone. Now I had to get it working with Apache. Got that compiled and installed but it doesn’t really work yet (haven’t looked into why).
My next thought was the instructions seem more plentiful for linux. I want to run linux, best I make a move.

Went out and bought a 200gb PATA disk. Formatted into enough fragments. Backed up some stuff from my main disk and started with the linux process.

Now, the first hurdle is the first two disks are SATA, sda and sdb and raided together at the hardware level as a raid 0.
Third disk is sdc.
When I started the install, suse10 warned me that these two disk are in a raid set, and the installer doesn’t know how to deal with them in the 2.6 kernel. I was ok with this. I wanted it all installed on sdc anyway.
Got to the partitioning stage and set up all the partitions on sdc to how I wanted them mounted. But I couldn’t see a way of telling the process to completely ignore sda and sdb. So I chickened out.

Removed disk sda and sdb.
Re-installed.
Got the dual head working. Got networking working. Looks sweet.
Put sda and sdb back. Windows still boots.

Then started work on how to get NTLDR to look for linux.
Found pages on it:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dual_Boot_from_Windows_Bootloader_(NTLDR)_and_why
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/linuxboot.html

The first thing I had to do was get linux to work out it is actually on sdc instead of sda when it installed. I think I’ve fixed that up in grub and fstab.
I then re-installed grub on sdc just to make sure that it knew it was there.

dd sdc and sdc1 to two separate files, because I’m not sure which one I should really be using. Set it up in boot.ini for Windows, rebooted and tried both. After futsing around a bit, they now both say:
“Windows was unable to find \system32\hal.dll, please re-install it”

I’m a little confused at this point since linux is meant to be booting once I select it from the list, not windows. I haven’t got around to searching this on google yet, I think it’ll be my next step.
I didn’t want to put this on the net yet because I would really like to figure it out for myself. I am open to short one liners like “Check file xyz for something or other” but I don’t want full instructions at this point.
Also need to give this blog some content, rather than just commenting others

There is the little linux man whispering in my ear, “format all disks and just go with linux”, but I’m not prepared to give up Windows just yet.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | April 8th, 2006 at 9:26 pm

Format all disks and just go with Windows

2. Lucien | April 9th, 2006 at 3:16 pm

I currently have the Ubuntu linkux distro running on my second HD. Windows is still my primary OS, and the one grub boots to by default.
they both live happily together on my system, but then I don’t have a raid

The Ubuntu installer is VERY nice. Nicest linux install I’ve ever done.

The draw back with Ubuntu is that it’s aimed at end users, not developers, so it doesn’t come with a lot of dev stuff I assumed would be there. But the package manager is so nice to use that installing anything else is simple. Ever for a linux retard like me

3. admin | April 9th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

Zooba is that little voice inside my head.
Lucien, I tried installing Ubuntu, but I had trouble setting up the network. I propably could have for it to work, but suse10 picked it up quicker.

4. Xavier | April 10th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

Are you sure you’re selecting the right hd in grub? I know it does it kind of a strange way. Sounds weird that one of your entries is trying to get into windows.