[TriLUG] Installing Debian Stable on old hardware

[Alan Porter]

 > Which release of Debian did you use? I just tried that approach with
 >Sarge and my dad's laptop.. Seemed to get the base system "installed" 
okay,
 >but I couldn't get grub installed. I tried booting from floppy with the
 >drive in the Stylistic anyhow, specifying root=/dev/hda3, but for some
 >reason it didn't like that. The error messages were quite cryptic and I
 >don't remember them exactly, but it was something to the effect of it
 >couldn't find /dev/hda3 (although I'm certiain it's there...).

I run into this same type of problem with embedded Linux. I make
an image on my laptop, write the image to a compact flash card, and
then move the CF card to a target system.

If the drive is not called "/dev/hda" on both systems, it can be
confusing.

You have to be very careful with GRUB (and LILO). In some cases, you
specify the device name as it appears to the development machine. In
other cases, you use the device that the target uses.

In my case, when I run GRUB or LILO, I have to tell it to install to 
/dev/sda1,
but several places in my menu.lst or lilo.conf files refer to /dev/hda.

Make sure you know what the target system (the Stylistic) calls its
hard disk. It's not always /dev/hda.

If you'd like to see some specific examples of grub "menu.lst" files, let
me know off-list.


Alan