Help! I've installed a GNU on the same volume as XP

fwor

paddyrg wrote: »

Actually that's really helpful info - I have got three beautifully engineered thin client machines that boot from 32M CF cards (too small for DSLinux or Puppy even), would make awesome kiosk machines, slitaz sounds worth a try from what you say!

Sorry, I should have qualified that: The base package download is only 30MB, but it unpacks itself when loading into RAM - so it looks like you would need at minimum 128M of RAM for the kernel and RAM-based filesystem to run in.

paddyrg

fwor wrote: »

Sorry, I should have qualified that: The base package download is only 30MB, but it unpacks itself when loading into RAM - so it looks like you would need at minimum 128M of RAM for the kernel and RAM-based filesystem to run in.

Ahhh OK, these units only have 64M RAM, this may not be ideal then... Cheers!

I'm loathe to spend cash on these as they're going to get so little use, and people seem to overvalue small old CF and SODIMMs and want nearly add much for a few megs secondhand as for a few gigs new, they should be throwaway prices!

fwor

paddyrg wrote: »

Ahhh OK, these units only have 64M RAM, this may not be ideal then... Cheers!

I'm loathe to spend cash on these as they're going to get so little use, and people seem to overvalue small old CF and SODIMMs and want nearly add much for a few megs secondhand as for a few gigs new, they should be throwaway prices!

Yeah, I know what you mean - people wanting silly money for 128MB CF cards when you can get 2GB for almost nothing...

But it might be worth trying with a bigger CF card and no more RAM. It will page a lot onto swap space on the CF card, so you will be heavily dependent on how fast the i/o to that is. My personal experience of this trying to build a silent HTPC with a CF card instead of HDD was not good though - it was OK once it got going, but it took ages to boot!

JJ_Egan

Chronicles of GNU.
Spect it will be made a film soon .


jje

paddyrg

fwor wrote: »

...might be worth trying with a bigger CF card and no more RAM. It will page a lot onto swap space on the CF card, so you will be heavily dependent on how fast the i/o to that is. My personal experience of this trying to build a silent HTPC with a CF card instead of HDD was not good though - it was OK once it got going, but it took ages to boot!

The hardware I'm using is underpowered but totally awesome build quality - these boxes are the size of a medium paperback book, and have USB, parallel, stereo audio, monitor, mous, keyb and network ports, 5v in, with separate psu and only cost me 6 quid each. Silent operation. Actually if Google do a decent job with ChromeOS with just a kernel and a browser these will make great hosts for kiosks, so the boot time is not really a deal. Want one? ;-)

JJ_Egan

Actually if Google do a decent job with ChromeOS

Shoved down the to do list as resources will concentrate on Android .

jje

23n1th

paddyrg wrote: »

The hardware I'm using is underpowered but totally awesome build quality - these boxes are the size of a medium paperback book, and have USB, parallel, stereo audio, monitor, mous, keyb and network ports, 5v in, with separate psu and only cost me 6 quid each. Silent operation. Actually if Google do a decent job with ChromeOS with just a kernel and a browser these will make great hosts for kiosks, so the boot time is not really a deal. Want one? ;-)

What about TinyCore? http://tinycorelinux.com/welcome.html

10mb download.

(OP: NOT for you!)

nottseagull

fwor wrote: »

GPARTED tells you what filesystem each partition is formatted to. Unsurprisingly this is shown in the column titled "File System".

I assumed you had realised gparted showed FAT32 as when I reported that it showed the one partition, I would have certainly noticed if it stated a file system other than the one we presumed; but I should have made that clearer. Also, when you said Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4 are all journalling filesytems and if your partition has any of these then Windows will be gone, I thought it meant a partition could hold more than one file system which is why I asked how to look for exts. Your sarcasm put me back on track however, but while searching for them I did come across this table, although I think it just displays SliTaz's capabilities in this area. So, another 'useless picture' .....

fwor

The table you see is actually specific to GPARTED, not SliTaz - and looks exactly the same under Ubuntu, for example. It shows you what GPARTED can do (or not) with each filesystem type.

To confirm: you can only have one filesystem per partition (or, confusingly, none in some types of partition).

In your position, I would try the "fix boot of windows" option in SGD. Whether it works or not, it will probably blow away the existing GRUB which starts SliTaz off the HDD, but I doubt you care about that.

Before you do that, it would be interesting to start up SliTaz and look with PCMan File Manager to see what files you have at the root of your HDD. If you have files such as boot.ini, io.sys, ntldr and pagefile.sys (which are some of the key files that allow Windows to boot) then there's a ~fair~ chance that you will eventually recover the situation.

nottseagull

fwor wrote: »

In your position, I would try the "fix boot of windows" option in SGD. Whether it works or not, it will probably blow away the existing GRUB which starts SliTaz off the HDD, but I doubt you care about that.

Before you do that,

Already tried that, it was the only one I dared try from that list. It led to 'syslinux' (the only option) and then to 'hard disc to uninstall grub' list'. It didn't seem to do anything, SliTaz just boots as normal.

And no I don't care, and anyway there's a list which includes 'restore grub in hard disc(MBR) or partition, alongside 'boot your gnu/linux or (other OS)'.
Are you only selecting options from my pics? There are a host of other options on several lists, one of which
is 'restore windows partition (NTFS) boot backup' (sounds promising!)

I think I recall all those files you mentioned, especially if they were under blue diamond or text file icons. However I think
'root' was empty, they came under something else.