- Joined
- Oct 11, 2003
Problems installing gentoo [now solved]
I've tried installing gentoo using the minimal LiveCD, Knoppix, and PCLinux OS with no success. The LiveCD won't detect my network card (a Netgear MA311), and I can't seem to get it working. I've searched the gentoo forums and online but everything I try doesn't seem to work. If I do "lspci" I can see the MA311 listed, but I can't load the orinoco_pci drivers or get it listed under ifconfig. I've tried '/etc/init.d/wlan restart' and it gives me a "command not found" type of message and 'ifconfig wlan0 up' tells me that wlan0 doesn't exist. When I do ifconfig, it lists two network cards, neither of which is my MA311. The first one listed is eth0, my motherboard's built-in ethernet, which it correctly lists as unplugged. The second one listed is something called 'lo', which the system tells me is a "loopback." I found some other thread that said to look in /etc/modules/autoload for the correct driver, but the LiveCD tells me that that directory doesn't exist. At this point I just decided to give up on the LiveCD and try knoppix, which also doesn't detect my network card properly. I'm now typing this on PCLinux OS (a mandrake-based bootable distro), which does detect my card, so i figured I'd just continue from step 4, "Preparing the Disks." I've got my partitions planned out (see below), but when I try to create filesystems on them it fails to work. I first put ext2 on my boot partition, which worked fine. Then I use mkswap on my swap partition, no problems so far. When I try to use swapon to activate the swap partition it tells me "the device is in use," so i try to format my root partition. I've tried both reiserfs and ext3 on it, and both are not cooperating. Using version 3.6.10 of the mkreiserfs tool, I get the error message "mkreiserfs_create: can not create that small (0 blocks) filesystem," even though when I do fdisk and list my partitions I see that that partition contains millions of blocks. I decided to try ext3, at which point I get the message "Invalid argument passed to ext2 library while setting up superblock." I try to mount the partition anyway, even though its not formatted, but the mount command tells me, "/dev/hde4: no such file or directory," even though both /dev/hde4 and /mnt/gentoo have been created. I'm trying to dual boot gentoo with Windows XP Professional, which I have already loaded onto this computer, but I don't think that's causing any problems. Please help
Partitions:
40GB Windows XP Professional- NTFS- /dev/hde1
64MB Linux boot- ext2- /dev/hde2
1GB Linux Swap- /dev/hde3
~GB Linux Root- no filesystem seems to work- /dev/hde4
System Specs:
Abit NF7-S 2.0 Motherboard
512MB Corsair PC2700 DDR RAM
Seagate 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive (I'm pretty sure the SATA is why my drive is listed under /dev/hde instead of /dev/hda)
Barton 2500+ processor
Geforce 2 MX400
CD-ROM drive
CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive
Floppy drive
Netgear MA311 802.11b Network card (Prism 2.5 chipset, I've gotten it to work under redhat 9 and Windows XP)
PS- I've also posted this on the gentoo forums, but so far nobody's really helped
I've tried installing gentoo using the minimal LiveCD, Knoppix, and PCLinux OS with no success. The LiveCD won't detect my network card (a Netgear MA311), and I can't seem to get it working. I've searched the gentoo forums and online but everything I try doesn't seem to work. If I do "lspci" I can see the MA311 listed, but I can't load the orinoco_pci drivers or get it listed under ifconfig. I've tried '/etc/init.d/wlan restart' and it gives me a "command not found" type of message and 'ifconfig wlan0 up' tells me that wlan0 doesn't exist. When I do ifconfig, it lists two network cards, neither of which is my MA311. The first one listed is eth0, my motherboard's built-in ethernet, which it correctly lists as unplugged. The second one listed is something called 'lo', which the system tells me is a "loopback." I found some other thread that said to look in /etc/modules/autoload for the correct driver, but the LiveCD tells me that that directory doesn't exist. At this point I just decided to give up on the LiveCD and try knoppix, which also doesn't detect my network card properly. I'm now typing this on PCLinux OS (a mandrake-based bootable distro), which does detect my card, so i figured I'd just continue from step 4, "Preparing the Disks." I've got my partitions planned out (see below), but when I try to create filesystems on them it fails to work. I first put ext2 on my boot partition, which worked fine. Then I use mkswap on my swap partition, no problems so far. When I try to use swapon to activate the swap partition it tells me "the device is in use," so i try to format my root partition. I've tried both reiserfs and ext3 on it, and both are not cooperating. Using version 3.6.10 of the mkreiserfs tool, I get the error message "mkreiserfs_create: can not create that small (0 blocks) filesystem," even though when I do fdisk and list my partitions I see that that partition contains millions of blocks. I decided to try ext3, at which point I get the message "Invalid argument passed to ext2 library while setting up superblock." I try to mount the partition anyway, even though its not formatted, but the mount command tells me, "/dev/hde4: no such file or directory," even though both /dev/hde4 and /mnt/gentoo have been created. I'm trying to dual boot gentoo with Windows XP Professional, which I have already loaded onto this computer, but I don't think that's causing any problems. Please help
Partitions:
40GB Windows XP Professional- NTFS- /dev/hde1
64MB Linux boot- ext2- /dev/hde2
1GB Linux Swap- /dev/hde3
~GB Linux Root- no filesystem seems to work- /dev/hde4
System Specs:
Abit NF7-S 2.0 Motherboard
512MB Corsair PC2700 DDR RAM
Seagate 80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive (I'm pretty sure the SATA is why my drive is listed under /dev/hde instead of /dev/hda)
Barton 2500+ processor
Geforce 2 MX400
CD-ROM drive
CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive
Floppy drive
Netgear MA311 802.11b Network card (Prism 2.5 chipset, I've gotten it to work under redhat 9 and Windows XP)
PS- I've also posted this on the gentoo forums, but so far nobody's really helped
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