New 40g Hard drive; Puppy Linux = not found

[jagwinn]

Hello,
I tried to search this problem but did not use correct terms and found nothing. So I post.
I have a T20. It came to me without a hard drive. Puppy loaded into RAM from a CD and calls the hard drive 'fb0' and will not install onto it.
When I exit Puppy, Puppy did write to the 'fb0' a file with my information.
It will now load Puppy without the CD.

What I would like is to know what I need to do to make the HDD perform and be recognized as an HDD.
Should I format the HDD? and if so how?

[information gathered on this machine:
T20
type 2647-24U
OS COA is for Win98SE
HDD was purchased from Amazon; 40g]

Thanks for any thoughts you have on this,
John

[Neil]

Hello John, welcome to the forum.

One of the things I really like about Puppy is it's universal installer, which takes you by the hand, and guides you step by step through the install process. There is no guesswork or wondering what to do next.

You kind of lost me a little with your description of what you have done so far, so I'm going to mostly ignore that and give some pointers on how to install Puppy.

You will first need to partition and format the HDD using Gparted (included on the live CD). Then you can use the universal installer. One of the options along the way is where to install, so choose the ATA internal HDD option, and the installer will ask you to verify that you want to install on sda1 (probably), choose yes and continue. One item of note, I think Puppy still requires one to install GRUB in a seperate step after installing the system. A temp file is created with a sample GRUB menu.list that if written into the new GRUB file will allow Puppy to boot.

You can get more help installing Puppy from the Puppy Linux forum:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/

[jagwinn]

Thanks Neil!
I cleared the machine by removing the battery and the back-up battery. This cleared all the settings to default.
I then installed Win2000PRO and formatted the drive. [Win2K because that is the only OS I have other than restore disks]
So, now I have that installed and running. I will next allow Puppy to install for dual-boot.

Thanks for the direction to the PuppyForum; I joined today and hope to eventually grasp Linux enough to remove the Win2K from this T20 in the near future!

Thanks again,
John

[Neil]

Another cool thing about Puppy, if you want to install along with Win2k, is what is called a "fugal" install. You won't even have to create a new partition, or resize the Windows one. Puppy can be installed right on a FAT32 or NT partition, then using GRUB you can choose which one to boot.

[jagwinn]

Neil,
Trouble in Mudville....GParted does not find any HDD to work on. Nor does Puppy install icon [No objects found].

Two icons above the MENU button on the toolbar...one is the CD-Rom and the other is listed in the information balloon as "fbo. Legacy Floppy Drive size:0".
John

[jagwinn]

I selected the icon MOUNT and it listed 'fbo' and the CD-Rom. I selected 'fbo' and I got a red flag saying Unable to mount 'fbo'. While MOUNT was listing devices, the HDD green LED was on.

[Neil]

Must not have the HDD installed correctly. Do you have it in a caddy with all four screws?
Do you even have a floppy drive? Puppy is probably reading the floppy controller, and not an actual drive.

[jagwinn]

Neil,

I ordered the caddy and the HDD at the same time. I used 4 side screws to mount the HDD to the tray. I used the original plastic face plate as the new one was lacking a metal reinforcement and one locking tab was bent.

After the failure of recognition, I dismantled the lappy and put the HDD back into the dock. I then noticed that ther are 4 pins that do not have a place in the connector attached to the MOBO. That may or may not have a bearing on the problem.

Win2K is working fine. I installed Office 2000 without any problem.
Currently, I cannot gain internet access with W2K and device manager has yellow exclamation marks. Attempts to update the drivers using the W2K install disk do not find any drivers. There are 4 devices connected with LAN and internet all not installed.
But that is a minor point as Puppy did just fine downloading some updates for itself from the net.

But, Puppy cannot recognize the HDD.

I tried to MOUNT 'fbo' and regular default mounting failed to mount it. An option to use a second method was given in the window that opened and I tried it and it did find the HDD as indicated by the green 'can' icon and said it was a 35g Legacy floppy....but even then eventually I got a red flag saying it could not be mounted.

I have, beside Puppy, Mint10 and Ubuntu10. Perhaps better luck with one of these.

So, is there a source to download drivers for the missing devices that worked with W98SE for the new W2K OS?

Thanks,
John

[Neil]

Sorry about the brain fade a while ago...if you were able to install Windows, the HDD must have been installed correctly. Beats me why Puppy can't find the HDD. No surprise that you can't mount a non-existent floppy, though. Certainly won't hurt anything to try the other live Linux disks and see what happens.

You can download all the Windows drivers from Lenovo Support:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... IGR-4JSQHB

[jagwinn]

O.K., the story so far.....
All indications are the BIOS of the T20 may be faulty. If possible.
I put the live CD for the following in the CD-ROM with the same results:

Puppy
Mint10
Ubuntu10

The results being that none would start the CD from a cold start (load CD; Power off; restart with CD in the tray).
All started with the RUN command, though.
And all 3 offered to INSTALL and DEMO. And when told to do so, all 3 failed due to LACK OF PERMISSION.

Puppy is the only one to start on a cold start, but ONLY after the back-up battery has been disconnected and then the trouble stated in previous posts persist.

I really would like this T20 for a LINUX machine, but it is a puzzler!

John

[Neil]

It's a little old, but there might be some useful info over at Thinkwiki:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installin ... inkPad_T20

[jagwinn]

Hey Neil!,

Little embarassed here....hehe....everywhere you read [CD] in my previous posts, replace with DVD.

Now I don't have a DVD drive.....CDROM only. That explains it.

Puppy, however is on CD and I did discover that it will load only after I remove the backup battery.

I will now download the MINT10 iso to CD.

Thanks,
John