Debian sarge installer 3.1 beta

**Dswissmiss** · 03-25-2004, 01:55 AM

Hi guys.

I'm playing around with distros and wanted to install debian using the new installer.

After the language selector and hardware detector, it asks me to either install debian on the entire hdd, or manually partition. My partitions are:

#1 Primary 8.3GB NTFS
#5 Logical 63.96GB NTFS
#3 Primary 526.4MB swap
#5 Primary 7.1GB reiserfs

The selections are to either Finish partitioning and write changes to disk, Automatically partition drives, and to configure the logical volume manager.

I was scared to lose my files on windows, but after reading the installer help on debian's website, I chose to Finish partitioning and write changes to disk. After that however, I get an error screen telling me that: No root filesystem us defined.
Any ideas on what to do?

Thank you
Dswissmiss

**pbharris** · 03-25-2004, 02:30 AM

hello,
i would run fdisk (linux version!!) and see what is there, make sure you don't write. hopefully everything is still there (you did back up your data 1st - right?) . if everything is still there make the new partitions and then try the installer again, this time choose maual. also - what are those partition number - any primary partition needs to be 1 -4, logical partitions start at # 5

**Dswissmiss** · 03-25-2004, 02:39 AM

Hi, yeah, everything is still there (i'm posting from windows).

What should I make the new partitions with? Should I just delete them and let the installer do the rest? (wait, I don't think there's an option for that). I have Partition magic in windows, but I hear it messes up linux partitions sometimes.

I made a mistake when I wrote my previous post, the last partition (linux) is actually #4

thanx

**pbharris** · 03-25-2004, 02:55 AM

hello,
i would do it manually and make /dev/hda4 the linux root partition.

**Compunuts** · 03-25-2004, 05:42 AM

When you are at partitioning area, play around with TAB key. You will need to define what partition are to be what exactly ( such as root, var, usr, home, etc ). Unlike Windows, you can spread out your drive with different partition in Linux. You MUST have / (root) partition defined in order for Linux to function and the rest are optional.

**Dswissmiss** · 03-25-2004, 05:57 AM

Thanx guys.
I played around with it a bit and finally found the menu in which I could set root and format.

I stopped playing around with it for now because I couldnt get grub to dual boot with windows (it installed on ha0 or something), so I had to install my old distro to get back to my files.

I was also wondering how different debian is from say Libranet, where you have helper applications such as Xadminmenu which let you download fonts, set up internet connections and so on...not sure if I'm ready for debian yet

**Compunuts** · 03-25-2004, 06:18 AM

Libranet is Debian based with Gnome. So what could be different?

They take pure Debian, slap some configuration stuff together for you, and then charge for their work. All good to me.