Help install TC - doesn't find the hard disk

[jano]

Hi, I'm quite new with Tiny Core - and a newbie in linux.
I'm trying to use it / install it in a netbook (dual boot with the already installed Win XP) without success and would appreciate some help.
The first and main problem I have is that TC doesn't find (and therefore cannot mount, partition, etc) the harddisk when I boot TC from the live CD or from a pendrive.
The harddisk has 4 primary partitions : one hidden (the recovery partition of the notebook), 2 NTFS (Windows XP and DATA) and the fourth one is FAT32. The hd doesn't appear even after installing ntfs-3g: it doesn't show under /dev , nor with fdisk -l, or with the "mount tool" of cpanel.
The CD drive appears (and mounts correctly) as /dev/sr0 and the pendrive as /dev/sdb1

[gerald_clark]

Try V2.10rc1.
V2.9 has problems with some internal sd card readers using mmcblk devices.

[jano]

Thanks - I'll try and post the results

[curaga]

What's the device, and ide/sata chipset? What kind of disk?

Anything in dmesg?

[jano]

What's the device, and ide/sata chipset? What kind of disk?

Anything in dmesg?

The netbook is an Acer Aspire One, AO751H with an Intel Atom processor Z520 - hard disk is ide - 160 Gb.

What / where / how is dmesg ?

[Juanito]

What / where / how is dmesg ?

You open a terminal window and:

Code: [Select]

$ dmesg
[or, for example]
$ dmesg | tail -20

[curaga]

Or in the gui, control panel -> stats -> dmesg tab.


edit:
Oh, it's a poulsbo chip. Unsupported currently in TC 2.x. Unless someone makes an extension, wait for 3.x.

[jano]

dmesg shows a lot of info, but there is no indication of the harddrive.

Oh, it's a poulsbo chip. Unsupported currently in TC 2.x. Unless someone makes an extension, wait for 3.x.

Well, I'll keep an eye, waiting for TC 3.
Thanks for the help !!

[jano]

Follow up - and a little off topic, but may be of interest for somebody:
I have tried several other linux distros with the same notebook:
* DSL doesn't boot (from live PC or pendrive)
* Antix 8.2 doesn't boot (from live PC)
* Puppy linux 4.3.1 doesn't boot either (from live PC or pendrive)
* A Puppy linux derivate (acer-puppy) does boot and finds and mounts the hard disk - but I don't like it
So I'll wait for TC 3 

[jano]

Excuse my ignorance but there is something I don't understand : if the chipset is unsupported, how come the live CD, network, usb, etc does work? It seems that the only thing unsupported is the hard disk (maybe the sound also, but I haven't checked that) / as a matter of fact I'm posting from the netbook !
I have attached the output of dmesg (just in case)

Yet another probably stupid question, but I'm a newbie: as I've mentioned in the previous post, a puppy linux derivative, acer-puppy seems to work OK. Would it be possible to use acer-puppy's kernel (or whatever makes it work with my netbook) and merge it - use it in tinycore ?

[maro]

jano: You mentioned that 'acer-puppy' manages to "find your HD". Why don't you compare the 'dmesg' output after booting with that CD, with the one you've extracted from TC?

Furthermore, what is the output that you get on 'acer-puppy' when executing the following command: fdisk -l

BTW, your 'dmesg' output is "a bit short". For reasons I'm not quite sure off the beginning seems to be "lost". To extract a more complete version, I'd suggest to start TC with a boot code of 'syslog', and then grab the '/var/log/messages' file.

[jano]

Thanks for the reply.

I attach the dmseg report created with tinycore (I've used $ dmesg > tc-dmesg.txt to output it to a file, and I have then compared it with the report shown with control panel -> system statistics and they were identical). Note that there surely is a difference with the previously attached, as this one was created booting from a pendrive (sda1) while the former was created after booting from an external (usb) CD drive.

I have also attached the dmseg report from acer-puppy and the fdisk -l -> they seem to find the harddisk and its partitions without problem

[jano]

No luck either with TC 2.10 final
GuessI'll  have to wait for TC 3

[maro]

jano: I found it rather difficult to compare the acer-puppy with the TC results due to the unknown state of your hardware. I can "see" that there are different USB connected devices involved in each case, but this is what makes it so cumbersome.

You could give it one more shot using exactly the same hardware configuration to boot either OS e.g. using a CD-ROM. Use boot code 'syslog' for TC, so that you can provide the '/var/log/messages' file for either OS for comparison. Please note one could use sed -e "/ kernel: /!d" -e "s#.* kernel: ##" /var/log/messages > dmesg- to extract a more complete "quasi-dmesg" output. You also might want to describe the relevant hardware in more detail, e.g. in the 'fdisk -l' output for acer-puppy the fact that there is a 'Compaq diagnostics' partition seems a bit unusual to me. Could you provide more details about the use of these partitions? Am I correct to assume that this '/dev/sda' represents a 160GB Seagate SATA disk that TC does not detect?

[curaga]

maro, see PATA_SCH. It's rather unfortunate that this chipset doesn't run with the generic driver.