I've managed to answer a few of my own questions, so I thought I'd post the
results. See at the bottom, under the numbered questions. There is a very
odd discrepancy between the parition numbering from fdisk and the rest of
the system; if anyone could explain it I'd love to hear.
I also believe that several of the things I ran into are unfriendlinesses
or inadquacies in the documentation or programs. In particular, the need
to specify an initial argument to the boot parameters is not clear, and
both fdisk and cfdisk are freaking out with large hard drives. (My BIOS is
a few years old; large drives may work better with newer BIOS's).
>Having managed a trial install of Debian, I'm trying to get the kinks out.
>
>Original problem: The standard install had problems formatting and
recognizing my 13.6 Gig disk.
>I assume this is a limitation of cfdisk. I used fdisk from another window
and then rebooted to
>get things going. Because I wasn't sure all was well, and because I like
making things work, I thought
>I'd try giving the loader the hard drive geometry. Which led to ....
>
>
>Second problem: When I boot off the CheapBytes CD and type
>hd=26353,16,63
>It responds
>Could not find kernel image: hd=23353.,16
>
>I have tried some variants, including "default hd=....", and "hda=..." but
they all produce the same response.
>
>I've found a few other messages with this error message, but none of them
indicate how to handle a standard install. It sounds as if I need to say
xxxx hd=..... where xxx is some image name. But I'm not sure what xxx is.
>
>So I'd appreciate answers to any or all of the following questions:
>1) How do I specify hard drive geometry to the loader for the inital install?
linux hd=26353,16,63
You must specify the "linux". The Debian install guide spells this out in
section 7.1:
"If you add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to type the
boot method (the default is linux) and a space before the first parameter."
Other docs on LILO omit this, as far as I can tell.
>2) If I do specify such parameters, will it help cfdisk?
No. Even with this it continues to say
"FATAL ERROR: Bad Primary partition
Press any key to exit fdisk"
>
>3) If I don't, but use fdisk, will the rest of the install be OK (as long
as I honor the installation guides warnings >to activate paritions via the
installer GUI)?
Well, it sort of worked, as far as I can tell, except for one major
problem. fdisk and the rest of linux disagree on my partition numbering.
fdisk reports I have no partition 5, but 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Linux (e.g.,
when it's installing and asking which swap partition to activate, or when
one uses the df command) subtracts 1 from the partition numbers.
For example, fdisk reports partition 9 is my Linux swap. The install asks
if I want to activate hda8 as swap. fdisk says 8 is my Linux root.
fdisk is quite unhappy about my partitions; for example if I ask it to
verify it says things are all messed up (overlapping sectors, wrong total
number of sectors). I believe these all result from the drive exceeding
10024 cylinders. Some of the partitions were created by NT 4.0, SP4 disk
administrator (fdisk complains about both partitions so created).
