>>> New problem: Booted into DSLinux, my HD does not appear so I can't >>> wipe it. blkid and fdisk -l only show the USB stick assigned to >>> /dev/sda which is how I accidentally wiped it in the first place. >>> I'll try another distro on the USB stick. > > DSLinux couldn't find my HD because it needs the "sata" boot parameter > explicitly passed. However, after doing that it crashes while loading > the sata module. This is discussed online with no solution presented. > >> If DSLinux is what I think it is, it may have been (on hindsight) >> rather obvious that it may not support the block device your system HD >> is on or the filesystem used. The DS, afterall, has fairly predictable >> hardware. >> >> Something like DBAN or SysResCD will have a better chance of >> supporting a wider array of hardware. > > The problem with those two is I need something that can install to the > HD after wiping it. I also need something that can install on a 512MB > USB key since my 8GB key does not seem to be bootable. DSLinux was a > flop as described above, so I'm downloading Puppy Linux now. It's > about 100MB, and it has the "Puppy Universal Installer" which should > install to my HD. Hopefully it fares better with my SATA hardware > than DSLinux did. > > Also, in case it helps anyone in the future, unetbootin has a very > annoying habit of failing to download the selected ISO, returning no > error, and in fact reporting installation success. The symptom of > this is a boot menu with only "Default" available, which goes nowhere. > The solution is to download the ISO manually and point unetbootin to > it. > > I'll report back with Puppy Linux results.
Puppy Linux has wiped the HD and installed to /dev/sda3, but I can't get it to install GRUB to /dev/sda1. I get: I couldn't mount '/dev/sda1' read-write! Working on it.... - Grant
