never used cfdisk before, small HDD as well.

ejames82

i have a rather old hp pavillion that i would like to prevent from becoming useless. the hard drive in it is very small. it has a version of linux, probably ubuntu, already installed, because grub loads at bootup. being such a small hard drive, i have decided to install damn small linux instead, but i don't know how to use cfdisk, the native dsl partitioner.

dsl is running off the cdrom. it's not installed on the hard drive.

i became root by putting this in terminal:

sudo -s

then i accessed cfdisk by using this:

cfdisk /dev/hda

the cfdisk utility came on screen with the following info:

disk drive: /dev/hda

size 545513472 bytes 545MB

heads: 255 sectors per track: 63 cylinders: 66

hda1 primary linux 82.26 MB

hda2 primary linux ext2 172.74 MB

hda3 primary linux ext2 287.89 MB

to make a long story short, is this hard drive big enough for damn small linux?, and are these partitions adequate?

i could sure use some guidance using this utility. i don't honestly know which partition to use as root, which to make swap, which to make home, and which to make bootable.

going from the graphical user interface that ubuntu offers to cfdisk is quite a change. could someone lend some expertise? thanks.

kryptikos

Hi ejames...

Short answer is yes, DSL will work fine on your harddrive. It is specifically designed to be as minimal and yet as functional as possible, so ~550 MB hard disk will work just fine. The entire load of DSL can be as small as 50MB.

My advice would be to blow away all existing partitions on the disk. If you don't remember what is there and have no need for the data (if any) it is more simple to start fresh and not run into issues later.

Best place to start is their community wiki. They have specific techniques to install on hard drives. The first link is the main page for HDD installation. You can do it manually, or use the second link will will walk you through how to use their internal HDD script that will do the major work for you.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_to_the_Hard_Disk

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-hd-install.html

Hopefully that steers you in the right direction. Let me know if you run into issues.