John Greaton Wohlbier [Dienstag, 15. April 2003 00:59]:
>| I have an inspiron 600m that I am trying to set up as a
>| dual boot with debian and XP. For now let me just say
>| that the debian boot process (from floppies) doesn't work
>| (apm bios not found, kernel panic, etc.). Before explaining
>| the problem in detail to this list or debian-boot
>| I would like a way to generate a log file of the boot messages.
Without any working kernel it's difficult to log at all.
afaics you've got no filesystem support.
Perhaps you can make a screenshot (yes, with a camera :-)
You've got to get _something_ running, first.
Though i got no problems until now.... into what direction would i look when
an installer-kernel panics ?
Weird BIOS settings. Wrong kernel choice. Too less RAM ( and no swap
prepared). Corrupted or badly copied floppies. Exotic floppy drive.
Can you boot a Knoppix ?
>| I have one hard drive with (presently) two partitions. The first
>| partition is my Win XP and the partition I want to put debian
>| on is presently formatted as FAT32 if it matters.
I didn't hear of a Linux Rootfilesystem on fat32 yet....I think even if you
can get around with the security / permissions, still /proc (and /var ?) may
require extended features beyound fat32. And usually there's a swap partition.
And /boot (-partition) format should be familiar to your bootloader.
To be an the safe side, I would split the main partition into at last 2-3
pieces (you can use the installer menu, or the commandline-tool cfdisk from
the installer - should be also in Knoppix ):
One ext2 dedicated to become the root-filesys ( you can grade it up to ext3
later), one swap, and one fat32 for exchange with windows. If you don't
install grub as bootloader, i suggest an additional /boot partition. That's
a minimal configuration - there are arguments for more partitions. Perhaps
you hold back some spare space to decide that later. There will be threads in
probably most linux mail archives about various schemes.
--
micha.
