[Grml] How to install GRML to one harddrive with Windows XP installed on this harddrive?

[Mgr. Janusz Chmiel]

Dear users and developers,

I downloaded The latest stable release of GRML, and i Am very satisfied with this distro so i would like to use it on my harddrive. But I Am having problems.

I have one IDE harddrive with capacity 55,6 GB, with one NTFS partition in size 21,4 GB. In The rest of my harddrive, i created extended partition, but no EXT3 or other, i only created extended partition, no formatting it.

When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information, that there is partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this information. So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without destroiing my NTFS existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition? If so, i can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install GRML to A hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager. If to MBR or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM visually impaired user.

Thank You for Your information. I do not like Windows Xp installations and removing wrongly created operating systems installation by using partition managers. So i would like to perform installation of GRML by right way.

Thank You for Your help.

With kindness regards.

Janusz Chmiel
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[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz and Josh

I'll try to spell out how to install as best I can. I'm offshore on the
North Sea oil fields writing this from memory, but I'll do my best. You
should have a look at the grml2hd documentation too. There is also some
write up on http://grml.org/grml2hd


I will suppose that you only have one hard drive on your machine. grml 1.1
or later will see this as /dev/sda. grml 1.0 sees it as /dev/hda. Now you
want to know how many partitions it has. As root do this

# parted /dev/sda print

The partition editor is the 'guts' behind gparted and it reads the boot
sector of the disk to tell you how many partitions, what kind they are and
what size they are. My new acer laptop came with 4 ntfs partitions. The
first and fourth were hidden recovery partitions, the second was C drive
and the third was an empty drive (for automatic backups). Before Vista,
windows always expected to be the first primary partition on the first
hard disk.

Windows XP is usually located on /dev/sda1 It is the first primary
partition. There may be more than one partition.
Potentially partitioning and installing can wipe out your system and I
strongly urge you not to get rid of the system you used to until you are
much more familiar with grml. In a year or two you won't have Windows in
the house but you need to learn about linux and grml first. The first
thing you should do is to back up the master boot record or mbr of the
disk. I usually copy the first 63 sectors instead of just the first one as
Windows keeps altering what it does in this first cylinder. Get a floppy
disk, put it in the slot and do this (Make double sure there are no typing
mistakes.)

# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr bs=512 count=63

Count = 1 is probably all you need but that is my habit. Sector by sector
each 512 bytes at the very beginning of sda is copied into a file on the
floppy. You can use a usb pen instead if you don't have a floppy drive.
Put the pen drive in wait a couple of seconds then do

# dmesg | tail

in order to see what device label it has been given - say /dev/sdb1. Now
if something goes really wrong you should be able to rescue your windows
system by

# dd if=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr of=/dev/sda

Your windows system should now boot as if nothing had ever happened,
provided windows itself is untouched.

Janusz wrote:
When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information,
that there is
partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this
information.
So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without
destroiing my NTFS
existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition?
If so, i
can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install
GRML to A
hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager.
If to MBR
or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM
visually
impaired user.
===================================

Parted can be used as a long command line or within its own prompt. I
suspect the latter will be useful. If you go parted /dev/sda you get this
prompt:

(parted)

Now go help and you get all the commands available. Also the entire manual
is also online at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html as
a single html page

Go help mkpart and you are told how to make a partition from free space.
Let's take Janusz's example. He has a 56GB hard disk with Windows XP
occupyiing the first 34GB and free space after that. I would prefer to
make 3 partitions here. The first for grml, the second for a swap
partition and the third for the directory /home (the my documents of
linux). The home directory on its own partition will make it easier if you
had to reinstall the operating system as all the customisation files for
the ordinary user are kept there. You can have a swap file, like the
Windows pagefile.sys or 'virtual memory', but it is more usual in linux to
have a separate partion. The swap partition should be no more than 2x or
3x the amount of RAM you have. More is a waste of space.

(parted) mkpartfs logical linux-swap 34GB 35GB

would be the command to make and format a swap partition in the available
free space next to the windows partition (I usually put this partition
here as Windows often does not comply with conventions so if the
partition start gets trashed then it is only the swap and not the more
valuable system or home partition.) Partitions can be primary or logical.
Originally DOS could only boot from a primary partition but linux will
boot from anywhere. Now we can make the other partitions. grml will format
the system partition as ext3 by default but you should format the home
partition yourself.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 35GB 41GB

grml comes with 2.3GB of software and I think that 6GB would be enough for
my purposes though I actually have grml on a 10GB partition of an 80GB
disk at home. This leaves us 15GB for home.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 41GB 56GB
(parted) print

Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-56.679 gigabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.0GB 34.0GB primary ntfs boot
2 34.0GB 56.0GB extended n/a
5 34.0GB 35.0GB logical linux-swap
6 35.0GB 41.0GB logical ext3
7 41.0GB 56.0GB logical ext3

By convention for an msdos partition table there can only be 4 primary
partitions. Parted has created the extened partition by default in order
to maintain compatibility with the msdos style partion table. Parted does
not make ext3 filesystems on the partition but only ext2. (They can be
converted either way as one is a development of the other.)

(parted) quit

Now make a file system on partition 7.

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda7

If it complains that there is no such thing then do

# grml-rebuildfstab

This updates the kernel's information to the hard reality which parted has
just written.
Now make sure that you have everything running that you want to have
running and run the script grml2hd and install to /dev/sda6
If it messes up then you should be able to recover OK.

Josh may need to resize his ntfs file system to create space for grml.
Parted can do this also

# parted /dev/sda resize 1 0GB 20GB

would reduce Janusz's windows partition (the number 1 means the first
partition) from 34 to 20 GB - provided it did not contain more than 20 GB
of data. The resizing is done safely.


Hope this helps
Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz asked about where to install the boot loader when running grml2hd

By default it is placed in the partition boot sectors rather than the
master boot sectors at the beginning of the disk. I always use grub rather
than lilo as a bootloader. I'm more familiar with it. Write down which
partition you installed grml and grub to. Let's say it was /dev/sda3

Installing to the mbr should be fine but when it goes wrong you may lose
access to XP also, as well as the newly installed grml. This usually means
you made a mistake somewhere. It can be rescued using the cd. But make
sure you have a copy of the original mbr on a floppy or pen drive.

Installing to the partition means you avoid that but you will probably
find that the 1st reboot loads into XP instead of grml. This can be
overcome in several ways a) by making a boot option in C:\boot.ini in XP
(Does not work in Vista as it boots differently) b) by booting the CD then
at the first (isolinux) prompt go grub enter enter c) by having already
make a separate boot floppy or usb pen.

You should now have a list of options but go 'c' to give you a grub
command line

grub>

In grub terms /dev/sda3 is (hd0,2) So now go

grub> configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/menu.lst enter

This should load the grub menu and you just hit enter again to make it
boot. If you had installed to the mbr instead of the partition then you
don't need to do this it will boot straight into grml.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Thank you for the complement but I'm not really an expert. I've just made
all the same mistakes that you make!


Don't worry. Windows is blessedly stupid. ntldr will boot anything you
tell it to. Put in your grml CD and boot it as normal or just type
failsafe as it will be faster. Then mount the Windows partition like this:

# ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

Now we copy the boot sector of the grml partition to the root directory of
the Windows partition. Make sure the typing is correct when you do

# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/sda1/bootsect.sda3 bs=512 count=1

Use your text editor to add the next 2 lines to the bottom of boot.ini

C:\bootsect.sda3="grml"
timeout=30

Then reboot into Windows:

# shutdown -r now

ntldr should now give you a choice of booting windows or grml.

Hope this works for you
Please let us know

Moss

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.
I have made big error yesterday, that i did not wait for Your professional
advice, i used parted to create EXT3 partition, GRML2hd even formatted
even
it for me, but i have made error while pressing key for choosing, where to
install boot loader, so i had EXT3 filesystem with all files, but i had no
chance to boot. Do You think, that it could be made some modiffication to
boot.ini, so ntldr module could load The kernel from EXT3 partition?
Ubuntu
can be loaded, but i Am aware, that The module, which ntldr is calling is
different from the kernel. So my idea is to really make floppy drive and I
would like to boot from EXT3 partition. I could even use Opensuse live CD
and GUI oriented partition editor for creating unallocated space, then to
format it in GRML, and install to this partition by using Grml2HD script.
You gave me detailed instructions for resizing partition in GRML, i
unfortunately started to experiment myself yesterday, i used parted and
parted asked me, for start and end of partition, i did not know, which
number to press, i typed first number 1 second above 52000, so i created
partition in lenght above 52 GB, it was not A problem, because i
accidentally corrupted NTFS partition by using gparted while trying to
create partition in extended partition and i created one big unallocated
space on my harddrive so my data has been gone forever. FOrtunately, i
have
made backups of my data.
So I will install group on A floppy and i will try to edit configuration
file in this floppy to boot GRML without corrupting Windows XP.
Thank You again for Your support and the fact, that i wanted to experiment
myself caused loss of data and i made havoc on my harddrive. But EXT3
partition really contained The GRML installation without problems at The
end.
The kindness regards.
Janusz Chmiel

[Maurice McCarthy]

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.

It will be letter l for lilo, I think

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Sorry, I did not read your email too well. I think I am tired.

Do you managed to format the whole hard drive to ext3.
grml also has rescue tools for such a case, though you will have lost
data. If there is something precious to you lost then look at the
documentation for ddr-help, ddrescue, gddrescue and testdisk.

Sorry not to be of more help just now.
Testdisk can see lost partitions are try to restore them. It can read the
files on lost partions if they are not too badly damaged. I do not have a
lot of experience with these tools.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Regards

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz, this is the recipe from the Testdisk wiki for recovery.
Please study a little before you use it.
Good Luck
Moss



Recovery of reformated partition

If the partition has been reformated to another filesystem (FAT32 formated
as NTFS or vice-versa),

* run TestDisk,
* select the harddisk, the partition type
* choose Advanced
* select the partition
* choose Type,
* enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem
* choose Boot
* choose RebuildBS
* List
* If you can see your files, choose Write and confirm
* In Analyse, choose to rewrite the partition with the correct
partition type.

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz, this is the recipe from the Testdisk wiki for recovery.
Please study a little before you use it.
Good Luck
Moss



Recovery of reformated partition

If the partition has been reformated to another filesystem (FAT32 formated
as NTFS or vice-versa),

* run TestDisk,
* select the harddisk, the partition type
* choose Advanced
* select the partition
* choose Type,
* enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem
* choose Boot
* choose RebuildBS
* List
* If you can see your files, choose Write and confirm
* In Analyse, choose to rewrite the partition with the correct
partition type.

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz, this is the recipe from the Testdisk wiki for recovery.
Please study a little before you use it.
Good Luck
Moss



Recovery of reformated partition

If the partition has been reformated to another filesystem (FAT32 formated
as NTFS or vice-versa),

* run TestDisk,
* select the harddisk, the partition type
* choose Advanced
* select the partition
* choose Type,
* enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem
* choose Boot
* choose RebuildBS
* List
* If you can see your files, choose Write and confirm
* In Analyse, choose to rewrite the partition with the correct
partition type.

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Regards

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Regards

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Thank you for the complement but I'm not really an expert. I've just made
all the same mistakes that you make!


Don't worry. Windows is blessedly stupid. ntldr will boot anything you
tell it to. Put in your grml CD and boot it as normal or just type
failsafe as it will be faster. Then mount the Windows partition like this:

# ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

Now we copy the boot sector of the grml partition to the root directory of
the Windows partition. Make sure the typing is correct when you do

# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/sda1/bootsect.sda3 bs=512 count=1

Use your text editor to add the next 2 lines to the bottom of boot.ini

C:\bootsect.sda3="grml"
timeout=30

Then reboot into Windows:

# shutdown -r now

ntldr should now give you a choice of booting windows or grml.

Hope this works for you
Please let us know

Moss

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.
I have made big error yesterday, that i did not wait for Your professional
advice, i used parted to create EXT3 partition, GRML2hd even formatted
even
it for me, but i have made error while pressing key for choosing, where to
install boot loader, so i had EXT3 filesystem with all files, but i had no
chance to boot. Do You think, that it could be made some modiffication to
boot.ini, so ntldr module could load The kernel from EXT3 partition?
Ubuntu
can be loaded, but i Am aware, that The module, which ntldr is calling is
different from the kernel. So my idea is to really make floppy drive and I
would like to boot from EXT3 partition. I could even use Opensuse live CD
and GUI oriented partition editor for creating unallocated space, then to
format it in GRML, and install to this partition by using Grml2HD script.
You gave me detailed instructions for resizing partition in GRML, i
unfortunately started to experiment myself yesterday, i used parted and
parted asked me, for start and end of partition, i did not know, which
number to press, i typed first number 1 second above 52000, so i created
partition in lenght above 52 GB, it was not A problem, because i
accidentally corrupted NTFS partition by using gparted while trying to
create partition in extended partition and i created one big unallocated
space on my harddrive so my data has been gone forever. FOrtunately, i
have
made backups of my data.
So I will install group on A floppy and i will try to edit configuration
file in this floppy to boot GRML without corrupting Windows XP.
Thank You again for Your support and the fact, that i wanted to experiment
myself caused loss of data and i made havoc on my harddrive. But EXT3
partition really contained The GRML installation without problems at The
end.
The kindness regards.
Janusz Chmiel

[Maurice McCarthy]

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.

It will be letter l for lilo, I think

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Sorry, I did not read your email too well. I think I am tired.

Do you managed to format the whole hard drive to ext3.
grml also has rescue tools for such a case, though you will have lost
data. If there is something precious to you lost then look at the
documentation for ddr-help, ddrescue, gddrescue and testdisk.

Sorry not to be of more help just now.
Testdisk can see lost partitions are try to restore them. It can read the
files on lost partions if they are not too badly damaged. I do not have a
lot of experience with these tools.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Thank you for the complement but I'm not really an expert. I've just made
all the same mistakes that you make!


Don't worry. Windows is blessedly stupid. ntldr will boot anything you
tell it to. Put in your grml CD and boot it as normal or just type
failsafe as it will be faster. Then mount the Windows partition like this:

# ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

Now we copy the boot sector of the grml partition to the root directory of
the Windows partition. Make sure the typing is correct when you do

# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/sda1/bootsect.sda3 bs=512 count=1

Use your text editor to add the next 2 lines to the bottom of boot.ini

C:\bootsect.sda3="grml"
timeout=30

Then reboot into Windows:

# shutdown -r now

ntldr should now give you a choice of booting windows or grml.

Hope this works for you
Please let us know

Moss

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.
I have made big error yesterday, that i did not wait for Your professional
advice, i used parted to create EXT3 partition, GRML2hd even formatted
even
it for me, but i have made error while pressing key for choosing, where to
install boot loader, so i had EXT3 filesystem with all files, but i had no
chance to boot. Do You think, that it could be made some modiffication to
boot.ini, so ntldr module could load The kernel from EXT3 partition?
Ubuntu
can be loaded, but i Am aware, that The module, which ntldr is calling is
different from the kernel. So my idea is to really make floppy drive and I
would like to boot from EXT3 partition. I could even use Opensuse live CD
and GUI oriented partition editor for creating unallocated space, then to
format it in GRML, and install to this partition by using Grml2HD script.
You gave me detailed instructions for resizing partition in GRML, i
unfortunately started to experiment myself yesterday, i used parted and
parted asked me, for start and end of partition, i did not know, which
number to press, i typed first number 1 second above 52000, so i created
partition in lenght above 52 GB, it was not A problem, because i
accidentally corrupted NTFS partition by using gparted while trying to
create partition in extended partition and i created one big unallocated
space on my harddrive so my data has been gone forever. FOrtunately, i
have
made backups of my data.
So I will install group on A floppy and i will try to edit configuration
file in this floppy to boot GRML without corrupting Windows XP.
Thank You again for Your support and the fact, that i wanted to experiment
myself caused loss of data and i made havoc on my harddrive. But EXT3
partition really contained The GRML installation without problems at The
end.
The kindness regards.
Janusz Chmiel

[Maurice McCarthy]

So if script GRML2hd will ask me, i can press g letter to install Group.
If
i can be openheart to You, Grml2hd script is good, but if ok and cancel
choices are awailable and user do not know, when press which letter, g for
group, or other letter for lilo, it is confusing, atleast for me.

It will be letter l for lilo, I think

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz

Sorry, I did not read your email too well. I think I am tired.

Do you managed to format the whole hard drive to ext3.
grml also has rescue tools for such a case, though you will have lost
data. If there is something precious to you lost then look at the
documentation for ddr-help, ddrescue, gddrescue and testdisk.

Sorry not to be of more help just now.
Testdisk can see lost partitions are try to restore them. It can read the
files on lost partions if they are not too badly damaged. I do not have a
lot of experience with these tools.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Dear Janusz,

I've had a little time to look. I have 2
computers. one is an Acer laptop one year old.
It would not boot freedos at all, initdisk had
an opcode failure followed by a list of hex
numbers which I do not understand. I tried with
the grml cd and a freedos 1.0 live and
installation cd.

The other is an old Pentium II. It looks to me
that freedos boots from CD as a floppy emulation
whereas grml boots in non-emulation mode. This
means that when you say

If i will type
dos
At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But
please, which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i
wanted to type
Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only
graphical shell is included?

then you should already have a prompt

A:\>

Freedos already thinks it is on the A drive so
that if you type a: then nothing changes! When
you type c: you ought to get an error message
saying no such drive or similar.

2. When booting freedos did you choose the option
with himem.sys and emm386 and shcdux (the cd
driver?) Unless you have a very old system it is
probably wise.

3. Perhaps you might get help from

www.freedos.org

as freedos on grml is kind of an added extra
and I don't know if many people use it.

4. If you boot the grml cd and go

grub - any key - down arrow once - enter

then it boots freedos with a few utils including
the dos port of testdisk. It lands on this prompt

A:\TOOLS>

Now if you go testdisk /list (perhaps without the
backslash) then it will list all the current
partitions which it can see from dos. This may
give you some info as to why you cannot see the
fat32 partition.

5. Lastly unless I find my old XP installation
disk to try what you are doing for myself then
I'm getting stuck on how else to help. Still if
you have more questions then please ask.

Best Wishes
Moss


PS
I think you right that a bios by default ought to
look at a usb device to boot then a cd and thirdly
a hard disk. I cannot imagine that finding a usb
sound system should present too much difficulty.
Perhaps you should try Apple first. Might sound
odd but as their EFI boot is vastly superior to
the BIOS (which will be replaced in the not too
distant future, I reckon) then it would be an
enhancement for Apple above the competition. That
is there is something in it for them!

[Maurice McCarthy]

On reflection, since freedos boots into floppy
emulation and my laptop does not have a floppy
drive therefore it cannot load freedos.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

On reflection, since freedos boots into floppy
emulation and my laptop does not have a floppy
drive therefore it cannot load freedos.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

On reflection, since freedos boots into floppy
emulation and my laptop does not have a floppy
drive therefore it cannot load freedos.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Dear Janusz,

I've had a little time to look. I have 2
computers. one is an Acer laptop one year old.
It would not boot freedos at all, initdisk had
an opcode failure followed by a list of hex
numbers which I do not understand. I tried with
the grml cd and a freedos 1.0 live and
installation cd.

The other is an old Pentium II. It looks to me
that freedos boots from CD as a floppy emulation
whereas grml boots in non-emulation mode. This
means that when you say

If i will type
dos
At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But
please, which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i
wanted to type
Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only
graphical shell is included?

then you should already have a prompt

A:\>

Freedos already thinks it is on the A drive so
that if you type a: then nothing changes! When
you type c: you ought to get an error message
saying no such drive or similar.

2. When booting freedos did you choose the option
with himem.sys and emm386 and shcdux (the cd
driver?) Unless you have a very old system it is
probably wise.

3. Perhaps you might get help from

www.freedos.org

as freedos on grml is kind of an added extra
and I don't know if many people use it.

4. If you boot the grml cd and go

grub - any key - down arrow once - enter

then it boots freedos with a few utils including
the dos port of testdisk. It lands on this prompt

A:\TOOLS>

Now if you go testdisk /list (perhaps without the
backslash) then it will list all the current
partitions which it can see from dos. This may
give you some info as to why you cannot see the
fat32 partition.

5. Lastly unless I find my old XP installation
disk to try what you are doing for myself then
I'm getting stuck on how else to help. Still if
you have more questions then please ask.

Best Wishes
Moss


PS
I think you right that a bios by default ought to
look at a usb device to boot then a cd and thirdly
a hard disk. I cannot imagine that finding a usb
sound system should present too much difficulty.
Perhaps you should try Apple first. Might sound
odd but as their EFI boot is vastly superior to
the BIOS (which will be replaced in the not too
distant future, I reckon) then it would be an
enhancement for Apple above the competition. That
is there is something in it for them!

[Maurice McCarthy]

Dear Janusz,

I've had a little time to look. I have 2
computers. one is an Acer laptop one year old.
It would not boot freedos at all, initdisk had
an opcode failure followed by a list of hex
numbers which I do not understand. I tried with
the grml cd and a freedos 1.0 live and
installation cd.

The other is an old Pentium II. It looks to me
that freedos boots from CD as a floppy emulation
whereas grml boots in non-emulation mode. This
means that when you say

If i will type
dos
At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But
please, which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i
wanted to type
Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only
graphical shell is included?

then you should already have a prompt

A:\>

Freedos already thinks it is on the A drive so
that if you type a: then nothing changes! When
you type c: you ought to get an error message
saying no such drive or similar.

2. When booting freedos did you choose the option
with himem.sys and emm386 and shcdux (the cd
driver?) Unless you have a very old system it is
probably wise.

3. Perhaps you might get help from

www.freedos.org

as freedos on grml is kind of an added extra
and I don't know if many people use it.

4. If you boot the grml cd and go

grub - any key - down arrow once - enter

then it boots freedos with a few utils including
the dos port of testdisk. It lands on this prompt

A:\TOOLS>

Now if you go testdisk /list (perhaps without the
backslash) then it will list all the current
partitions which it can see from dos. This may
give you some info as to why you cannot see the
fat32 partition.

5. Lastly unless I find my old XP installation
disk to try what you are doing for myself then
I'm getting stuck on how else to help. Still if
you have more questions then please ask.

Best Wishes
Moss


PS
I think you right that a bios by default ought to
look at a usb device to boot then a cd and thirdly
a hard disk. I cannot imagine that finding a usb
sound system should present too much difficulty.
Perhaps you should try Apple first. Might sound
odd but as their EFI boot is vastly superior to
the BIOS (which will be replaced in the not too
distant future, I reckon) then it would be an
enhancement for Apple above the competition. That
is there is something in it for them!

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz asked about where to install the boot loader when running grml2hd

By default it is placed in the partition boot sectors rather than the
master boot sectors at the beginning of the disk. I always use grub rather
than lilo as a bootloader. I'm more familiar with it. Write down which
partition you installed grml and grub to. Let's say it was /dev/sda3

Installing to the mbr should be fine but when it goes wrong you may lose
access to XP also, as well as the newly installed grml. This usually means
you made a mistake somewhere. It can be rescued using the cd. But make
sure you have a copy of the original mbr on a floppy or pen drive.

Installing to the partition means you avoid that but you will probably
find that the 1st reboot loads into XP instead of grml. This can be
overcome in several ways a) by making a boot option in C:\boot.ini in XP
(Does not work in Vista as it boots differently) b) by booting the CD then
at the first (isolinux) prompt go grub enter enter c) by having already
make a separate boot floppy or usb pen.

You should now have a list of options but go 'c' to give you a grub
command line

grub>

In grub terms /dev/sda3 is (hd0,2) So now go

grub> configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/menu.lst enter

This should load the grub menu and you just hit enter again to make it
boot. If you had installed to the mbr instead of the partition then you
don't need to do this it will boot straight into grml.

Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz asked about where to install the boot loader when running grml2hd

By default it is placed in the partition boot sectors rather than the
master boot sectors at the beginning of the disk. I always use grub rather
than lilo as a bootloader. I'm more familiar with it. Write down which
partition you installed grml and grub to. Let's say it was /dev/sda3

Installing to the mbr should be fine but when it goes wrong you may lose
access to XP also, as well as the newly installed grml. This usually means
you made a mistake somewhere. It can be rescued using the cd. But make
sure you have a copy of the original mbr on a floppy or pen drive.

Installing to the partition means you avoid that but you will probably
find that the 1st reboot loads into XP instead of grml. This can be
overcome in several ways a) by making a boot option in C:\boot.ini in XP
(Does not work in Vista as it boots differently) b) by booting the CD then
at the first (isolinux) prompt go grub enter enter c) by having already
make a separate boot floppy or usb pen.

You should now have a list of options but go 'c' to give you a grub
command line

grub>

In grub terms /dev/sda3 is (hd0,2) So now go

grub> configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/menu.lst enter

This should load the grub menu and you just hit enter again to make it
boot. If you had installed to the mbr instead of the partition then you
don't need to do this it will boot straight into grml.

Moss

[Mgr. Janusz Chmiel]

Dear users and developers,

I downloaded The latest stable release of GRML, and i Am very satisfied with this distro so i would like to use it on my harddrive. But I Am having problems.

I have one IDE harddrive with capacity 55,6 GB, with one NTFS partition in size 21,4 GB. In The rest of my harddrive, i created extended partition, but no EXT3 or other, i only created extended partition, no formatting it.

When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information, that there is partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this information. So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without destroiing my NTFS existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition? If so, i can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install GRML to A hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager. If to MBR or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM visually impaired user.

Thank You for Your information. I do not like Windows Xp installations and removing wrongly created operating systems installation by using partition managers. So i would like to perform installation of GRML by right way.

Thank You for Your help.

With kindness regards.

Janusz Chmiel
-------------- next part --------------
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[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz and Josh

I'll try to spell out how to install as best I can. I'm offshore on the
North Sea oil fields writing this from memory, but I'll do my best. You
should have a look at the grml2hd documentation too. There is also some
write up on http://grml.org/grml2hd


I will suppose that you only have one hard drive on your machine. grml 1.1
or later will see this as /dev/sda. grml 1.0 sees it as /dev/hda. Now you
want to know how many partitions it has. As root do this

# parted /dev/sda print

The partition editor is the 'guts' behind gparted and it reads the boot
sector of the disk to tell you how many partitions, what kind they are and
what size they are. My new acer laptop came with 4 ntfs partitions. The
first and fourth were hidden recovery partitions, the second was C drive
and the third was an empty drive (for automatic backups). Before Vista,
windows always expected to be the first primary partition on the first
hard disk.

Windows XP is usually located on /dev/sda1 It is the first primary
partition. There may be more than one partition.
Potentially partitioning and installing can wipe out your system and I
strongly urge you not to get rid of the system you used to until you are
much more familiar with grml. In a year or two you won't have Windows in
the house but you need to learn about linux and grml first. The first
thing you should do is to back up the master boot record or mbr of the
disk. I usually copy the first 63 sectors instead of just the first one as
Windows keeps altering what it does in this first cylinder. Get a floppy
disk, put it in the slot and do this (Make double sure there are no typing
mistakes.)

# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr bs=512 count=63

Count = 1 is probably all you need but that is my habit. Sector by sector
each 512 bytes at the very beginning of sda is copied into a file on the
floppy. You can use a usb pen instead if you don't have a floppy drive.
Put the pen drive in wait a couple of seconds then do

# dmesg | tail

in order to see what device label it has been given - say /dev/sdb1. Now
if something goes really wrong you should be able to rescue your windows
system by

# dd if=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr of=/dev/sda

Your windows system should now boot as if nothing had ever happened,
provided windows itself is untouched.

Janusz wrote:
When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information,
that there is
partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this
information.
So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without
destroiing my NTFS
existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition?
If so, i
can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install
GRML to A
hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager.
If to MBR
or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM
visually
impaired user.
===================================

Parted can be used as a long command line or within its own prompt. I
suspect the latter will be useful. If you go parted /dev/sda you get this
prompt:

(parted)

Now go help and you get all the commands available. Also the entire manual
is also online at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html as
a single html page

Go help mkpart and you are told how to make a partition from free space.
Let's take Janusz's example. He has a 56GB hard disk with Windows XP
occupyiing the first 34GB and free space after that. I would prefer to
make 3 partitions here. The first for grml, the second for a swap
partition and the third for the directory /home (the my documents of
linux). The home directory on its own partition will make it easier if you
had to reinstall the operating system as all the customisation files for
the ordinary user are kept there. You can have a swap file, like the
Windows pagefile.sys or 'virtual memory', but it is more usual in linux to
have a separate partion. The swap partition should be no more than 2x or
3x the amount of RAM you have. More is a waste of space.

(parted) mkpartfs logical linux-swap 34GB 35GB

would be the command to make and format a swap partition in the available
free space next to the windows partition (I usually put this partition
here as Windows often does not comply with conventions so if the
partition start gets trashed then it is only the swap and not the more
valuable system or home partition.) Partitions can be primary or logical.
Originally DOS could only boot from a primary partition but linux will
boot from anywhere. Now we can make the other partitions. grml will format
the system partition as ext3 by default but you should format the home
partition yourself.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 35GB 41GB

grml comes with 2.3GB of software and I think that 6GB would be enough for
my purposes though I actually have grml on a 10GB partition of an 80GB
disk at home. This leaves us 15GB for home.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 41GB 56GB
(parted) print

Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-56.679 gigabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.0GB 34.0GB primary ntfs boot
2 34.0GB 56.0GB extended n/a
5 34.0GB 35.0GB logical linux-swap
6 35.0GB 41.0GB logical ext3
7 41.0GB 56.0GB logical ext3

By convention for an msdos partition table there can only be 4 primary
partitions. Parted has created the extened partition by default in order
to maintain compatibility with the msdos style partion table. Parted does
not make ext3 filesystems on the partition but only ext2. (They can be
converted either way as one is a development of the other.)

(parted) quit

Now make a file system on partition 7.

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda7

If it complains that there is no such thing then do

# grml-rebuildfstab

This updates the kernel's information to the hard reality which parted has
just written.
Now make sure that you have everything running that you want to have
running and run the script grml2hd and install to /dev/sda6
If it messes up then you should be able to recover OK.

Josh may need to resize his ntfs file system to create space for grml.
Parted can do this also

# parted /dev/sda resize 1 0GB 20GB

would reduce Janusz's windows partition (the number 1 means the first
partition) from 34 to 20 GB - provided it did not contain more than 20 GB
of data. The resizing is done safely.


Hope this helps
Moss

[Mgr. Janusz Chmiel]

Dear users and developers,

I downloaded The latest stable release of GRML, and i Am very satisfied with this distro so i would like to use it on my harddrive. But I Am having problems.

I have one IDE harddrive with capacity 55,6 GB, with one NTFS partition in size 21,4 GB. In The rest of my harddrive, i created extended partition, but no EXT3 or other, i only created extended partition, no formatting it.

When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information, that there is partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this information. So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without destroiing my NTFS existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition? If so, i can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install GRML to A hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager. If to MBR or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM visually impaired user.

Thank You for Your information. I do not like Windows Xp installations and removing wrongly created operating systems installation by using partition managers. So i would like to perform installation of GRML by right way.

Thank You for Your help.

With kindness regards.

Janusz Chmiel
-------------- next part --------------
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[Maurice McCarthy]

Janusz and Josh

I'll try to spell out how to install as best I can. I'm offshore on the
North Sea oil fields writing this from memory, but I'll do my best. You
should have a look at the grml2hd documentation too. There is also some
write up on http://grml.org/grml2hd


I will suppose that you only have one hard drive on your machine. grml 1.1
or later will see this as /dev/sda. grml 1.0 sees it as /dev/hda. Now you
want to know how many partitions it has. As root do this

# parted /dev/sda print

The partition editor is the 'guts' behind gparted and it reads the boot
sector of the disk to tell you how many partitions, what kind they are and
what size they are. My new acer laptop came with 4 ntfs partitions. The
first and fourth were hidden recovery partitions, the second was C drive
and the third was an empty drive (for automatic backups). Before Vista,
windows always expected to be the first primary partition on the first
hard disk.

Windows XP is usually located on /dev/sda1 It is the first primary
partition. There may be more than one partition.
Potentially partitioning and installing can wipe out your system and I
strongly urge you not to get rid of the system you used to until you are
much more familiar with grml. In a year or two you won't have Windows in
the house but you need to learn about linux and grml first. The first
thing you should do is to back up the master boot record or mbr of the
disk. I usually copy the first 63 sectors instead of just the first one as
Windows keeps altering what it does in this first cylinder. Get a floppy
disk, put it in the slot and do this (Make double sure there are no typing
mistakes.)

# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr bs=512 count=63

Count = 1 is probably all you need but that is my habit. Sector by sector
each 512 bytes at the very beginning of sda is copied into a file on the
floppy. You can use a usb pen instead if you don't have a floppy drive.
Put the pen drive in wait a couple of seconds then do

# dmesg | tail

in order to see what device label it has been given - say /dev/sdb1. Now
if something goes really wrong you should be able to rescue your windows
system by

# dd if=/mnt/floppy/windows.mbr of=/dev/sda

Your windows system should now boot as if nothing had ever happened,
provided windows itself is untouched.

Janusz wrote:
When I Am running GRML2hd script, The script is giving me information,
that there is
partition and free space above 34 GB. No NTFS word is occurring in this
information.
So:

Will GRMLhd2 format this extended partition automatically without
destroiing my NTFS
existing one? Or i have done a mistake, that i created extended partition?
If so, i
can remove this extended partition, but please, what i could do to install
GRML to A
hard disk with Windows Xp on it?

Grml2hd script is also giving me question, where to install boot manager.
If to MBR
or to other place. How to confirm The right choice by keyboard press, i AM
visually
impaired user.
===================================

Parted can be used as a long command line or within its own prompt. I
suspect the latter will be useful. If you go parted /dev/sda you get this
prompt:

(parted)

Now go help and you get all the commands available. Also the entire manual
is also online at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html as
a single html page

Go help mkpart and you are told how to make a partition from free space.
Let's take Janusz's example. He has a 56GB hard disk with Windows XP
occupyiing the first 34GB and free space after that. I would prefer to
make 3 partitions here. The first for grml, the second for a swap
partition and the third for the directory /home (the my documents of
linux). The home directory on its own partition will make it easier if you
had to reinstall the operating system as all the customisation files for
the ordinary user are kept there. You can have a swap file, like the
Windows pagefile.sys or 'virtual memory', but it is more usual in linux to
have a separate partion. The swap partition should be no more than 2x or
3x the amount of RAM you have. More is a waste of space.

(parted) mkpartfs logical linux-swap 34GB 35GB

would be the command to make and format a swap partition in the available
free space next to the windows partition (I usually put this partition
here as Windows often does not comply with conventions so if the
partition start gets trashed then it is only the swap and not the more
valuable system or home partition.) Partitions can be primary or logical.
Originally DOS could only boot from a primary partition but linux will
boot from anywhere. Now we can make the other partitions. grml will format
the system partition as ext3 by default but you should format the home
partition yourself.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 35GB 41GB

grml comes with 2.3GB of software and I think that 6GB would be enough for
my purposes though I actually have grml on a 10GB partition of an 80GB
disk at home. This leaves us 15GB for home.

(parted) mkpart logical ext3 41GB 56GB
(parted) print

Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-56.679 gigabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.0GB 34.0GB primary ntfs boot
2 34.0GB 56.0GB extended n/a
5 34.0GB 35.0GB logical linux-swap
6 35.0GB 41.0GB logical ext3
7 41.0GB 56.0GB logical ext3

By convention for an msdos partition table there can only be 4 primary
partitions. Parted has created the extened partition by default in order
to maintain compatibility with the msdos style partion table. Parted does
not make ext3 filesystems on the partition but only ext2. (They can be
converted either way as one is a development of the other.)

(parted) quit

Now make a file system on partition 7.

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda7

If it complains that there is no such thing then do

# grml-rebuildfstab

This updates the kernel's information to the hard reality which parted has
just written.
Now make sure that you have everything running that you want to have
running and run the script grml2hd and install to /dev/sda6
If it messes up then you should be able to recover OK.

Josh may need to resize his ntfs file system to create space for grml.
Parted can do this also

# parted /dev/sda resize 1 0GB 20GB

would reduce Janusz's windows partition (the number 1 means the first
partition) from 34 to 20 GB - provided it did not contain more than 20 GB
of data. The resizing is done safely.


Hope this helps
Moss

[Maurice McCarthy]

Dear Janusz

I'll gladly try to help but it may be a few days
before I can explore this for myself. I have
forwarded your email to the grml list in case any
one there may have a comment also.

Best Wishes
Moss

----- Forwarded message from "Mgr. Janusz Chmiel" <chmiel at phil.muni.cz> -----

Subject: question related to included Freedos in The GRML distro
From: "Mgr. Janusz Chmiel" <chmiel at phil.muni.cz>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 12:57:11 +0200
To: Maurice McCarthy <moss at mythic-beasts.com>

Dear syr,

You have been able to answer all my questions and thank's to You, i were
able to install GRML to A harddrive, i also deeply understood The parted
commands and other administrative tasks.

But i would like to ask You for next question.

If i will type
dos
At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But please,
which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i wanted to type

a:
or c:

Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only
graphical shell is included?

Is it possible to legally download smartdrv.exe or similar equivalent, which
installation program for Windows Xp will detect like smartdrv?

Thank You very much for Your answers.

The program
winnt.exe can be used for installing Windows XP from DOS, by using
setupmgr.exe running from Windows XP which is fully functional, visually
impaired user can make fully unattended Windows XP installation.

But i Am experiencing methodological problems, for example, i can not boot
To The FAT32 partition, which is containing installation files prepared by
using setupmgr.exe application.

I can access this partition by using Windows XP boot diskette or Windows 98
Se boot diskette, but i can not boot it by using smart boot manager.
Eventhough i set The FAT32 partition as a primary, which is a condition to
access this partition from DOS, fortunately, gparted is allowing this, that
i did not had to use logical partition with FAT32. I could resize existing
NTFS partition, and in The free space, i could specifi right start and end
of this FAT32 one. Parted is using reliable and safe algorithms, if user
knows, what he is doing with this tool.

It is possible to boot DOS if this operating system is being installed by a
first operating system, in this case, WIndows XP installation program is
making officially supported activity to support booting betveen DOS or
Windows XP.

But i want to support visually impaired users, so they could perform
unattended installation when their instalation of WIndows XP is being
corrupted.

There are even WEB pages with several DOS boot diskettes, which are having
included CD ROM Drivers, but i do not know, if those boot disks are legal to
use.

And there is not many modern computers with floppy drive, and bioses are not
setup by The way, so flash disk can beused for booting. And my algorithms
are intended to be fully usable by non sighted users.

If YOu would support me, i would be very glad.

There is awaylable solution, Nlite,

But i Am afraid, that Microsoft will force The author of this program to
remove it from The Internet, may be, that he consulted licensing issues with
The Microsoft CORP, because his WEB site and Nlite program is existing for
many years.

?His solution is working very reliably, even sound drivers can be integrated
to The .iso file.

But i would like to support official tools for deploying Windows XP
installation.

Visually impaired users are not able to use partition manager included in
Windows XP installation, this tool is also enough to make several
partitions, but i like parted and Linux, because i can have full control and
feetback from A screen reader.

Parted is not supporting so many actions like included partition manager in
Windows Xp installation.



----- End forwarded message -----

[Maurice McCarthy]

Dear Janusz

I'll gladly try to help but it may be a few days
before I can explore this for myself. I have
forwarded your email to the grml list in case any
one there may have a comment also.

Best Wishes
Moss

----- Forwarded message from "Mgr. Janusz Chmiel" <chmiel at phil.muni.cz> -----

Subject: question related to included Freedos in The GRML distro
From: "Mgr. Janusz Chmiel" <chmiel at phil.muni.cz>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 12:57:11 +0200
To: Maurice McCarthy <moss at mythic-beasts.com>

Dear syr,

You have been able to answer all my questions and thank's to You, i were
able to install GRML to A harddrive, i also deeply understood The parted
commands and other administrative tasks.

But i would like to ask You for next question.

If i will type
dos
At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But please,
which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i wanted to type

a:
or c:

Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only
graphical shell is included?

Is it possible to legally download smartdrv.exe or similar equivalent, which
installation program for Windows Xp will detect like smartdrv?

Thank You very much for Your answers.

The program
winnt.exe can be used for installing Windows XP from DOS, by using
setupmgr.exe running from Windows XP which is fully functional, visually
impaired user can make fully unattended Windows XP installation.

But i Am experiencing methodological problems, for example, i can not boot
To The FAT32 partition, which is containing installation files prepared by
using setupmgr.exe application.

I can access this partition by using Windows XP boot diskette or Windows 98
Se boot diskette, but i can not boot it by using smart boot manager.
Eventhough i set The FAT32 partition as a primary, which is a condition to
access this partition from DOS, fortunately, gparted is allowing this, that
i did not had to use logical partition with FAT32. I could resize existing
NTFS partition, and in The free space, i could specifi right start and end
of this FAT32 one. Parted is using reliable and safe algorithms, if user
knows, what he is doing with this tool.

It is possible to boot DOS if this operating system is being installed by a
first operating system, in this case, WIndows XP installation program is
making officially supported activity to support booting betveen DOS or
Windows XP.

But i want to support visually impaired users, so they could perform
unattended installation when their instalation of WIndows XP is being
corrupted.

There are even WEB pages with several DOS boot diskettes, which are having
included CD ROM Drivers, but i do not know, if those boot disks are legal to
use.

And there is not many modern computers with floppy drive, and bioses are not
setup by The way, so flash disk can beused for booting. And my algorithms
are intended to be fully usable by non sighted users.

If YOu would support me, i would be very glad.

There is awaylable solution, Nlite,

But i Am afraid, that Microsoft will force The author of this program to
remove it from The Internet, may be, that he consulted licensing issues with
The Microsoft CORP, because his WEB site and Nlite program is existing for
many years.

?His solution is working very reliably, even sound drivers can be integrated
to The .iso file.

But i would like to support official tools for deploying Windows XP
installation.

Visually impaired users are not able to use partition manager included in
Windows XP installation, this tool is also enough to make several
partitions, but i like parted and Linux, because i can have full control and
feetback from A screen reader.

Parted is not supporting so many actions like included partition manager in
Windows Xp installation.



----- End forwarded message -----