I'm trying to upgrade,have started with my first physical IDE Hard Drive and run into a problem.
hda was the original and a small disk, with a W95 installation, a small e2fs /boot partition and FreeBSD from an earlier experiment. When I became committed to Debian, I bought a second larger disk and as hdb used it for Slink and later Potato. Now I have a 20G drive to replace the small one, and eventually make room for Woody etc. I also intended to upgrade the CPU and M/Board next week. I've had to agree to keep a 500Mb partition for W95, so did the following:- a. Removed hda3 (the boot partition) from /etc/fstab, and booted from a floppy to prove I would have no problem with Potato. b. Physically changed the disks and installed MS-DOS 6.22 onto the new one. I've never liked the fdisk with DOS/Win, so I booted into Potato to finish partitioning the disk as I had planned. c. cfdisk hda gives the error message 'Fatal Error: Bad Signature on partition table - press any key etc. to leave' fdisk hda gives no message - just locks Potato completely. If I try to re-login (as opposed to reboot), the message 'hda: lost interrupt' keeps recurring. If I go into DOS and run format or fdisk to wipe the disk clean, I continue to get the same messages (I did this thinking the problem had something to do with the first cylinder difficulty which I've never understood - can't tell if it could as I don't know what cyls fdisk has used for DOS). Can anyone please shed any light on my problem. A little OT; can two separate Potato installations exist on the same box - if so I could put another on the new disk - never have any great problem in installing Debian, so that might clear things (at least I could 'see' what I do partitioning. Regards, John.
