[Sderby] Linux on a laptop.

[Harry Sheppard]

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Hi Graham,

Not a hundred percent sure what's causing this, but a similar problem I 
experienced (when taking an HDD out of a machine running Linux/Sparc64 into 
one running Linux/i386) was cured by zeroing out the first few meg of the 
hard drive before starting the install, hence ensuring that a totally fresh 
partition table is written during the HDD setup phase.

Note that this command will do a very good job of losing all the information 
from your drive - use with care!!

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1k count=20480

Try re-running the install and see if that cures it.

If not, you might want to try removing the drive from your laptop and 
performing the install on a desktop machine. The drive can be attached to a 
standard 40-pin IDE connector by using a 2.5" to 3.5" HDD adaptor which cost 
around a tenner and can be bought from here::

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=12#p81

The adaptor also has a standard 4-pin molex on one end to supply power to the 
2.5" drive.

This method of installation also has the side effect of being a lot quicker 
than on your laptop, the installer now able to run on a (probably) quicker 
processor and CD-ROM.

This was the method I used for a friend of mine who had one of those 
sub-compact notebooks that had no built-in CD-ROM or floppy and no provision 
for network boot. Once the base system has been installed, chuck the drive 
back into the laptop and give it a whirl :-)

Hope that helps,
- --Harry Sheppard
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