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Re: [LUG] More frustrations )-:

 

On 13/06/11 10:03, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> 
> Anyway, hand-crafting a partition table with sfdisk sorted it for me.
> (Although now cfdisk now won't look at the partition table, fdisk tells
> me I have a paritition not on a cylinder boundary and thus isn't DOS
> compatable, even though it's 100% correct as far as Linux cares!)

So you spent time "fixing" an issue that saves a fraction of 0.00005% of
your available disk space (did this space cost as much as a tenth of a
penny?), instead of accepting the default which is more compatible with
other tools and then wonder why this process is frustrating?

> Then I tried to add in a 2nd identical drive, used sfdisk to copy the
> partition over, then went through the runes to install mdadm, and do it
> properly. Got stuck there. Well stuck. Wasted a long time. Still don't
> have this sorted - had to uninstall mdadm in the end and ended up
> copying a lot of data - again.

Wouldn't it have been less painful just to install the OS to the new
disks, and copy across the data from the old one. It takes about 20
minutes to partition the disks as a mirrored pair, and install basic
Debian, and can all be done from the installers menus.

> Then I tried to compile a custom kernel 

Why? If it is to save a few seconds on boot, you've already spent that
time many times over.

> - easy enough, but it doesn't
> work. It stops halfway through the boot sequence, and right now I can't
> work out why.

At which point, last message/error?

> All in all, it's been a fairly frustrating experience - the good-side is
> that the 3 PCs I built recently all more or less "just worked" and
> following through the published stuff to make DVDs & CDs play was all
> very fine and good and relatively straighforward - so when you stick to
> the system, it seems it's fine, but dare to deviate ...

You have to understand it, a lot has changed, but most of it is progress
(like UUID, which are a tad unwieldy, but make it much easier to move
file systems around if you actually move the filesystem rather than copy
the data, which would have been fine as it can be extended etc).

> Linux from scratch is looking more and more attractive ...

If you don't know how to build a modern kernel to boot your system I
doubt Linux from Scratch will make it substantially easier. Presumably
you forgot to compile in a required driver (SATA?), or you passed a UUID
to the boot loader and don't have anything clever enough to make use of
it in the boot process (like urm initrd kernel).



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