Apparently My Discs Are Too Small?

Hello,

I'm a new Linux user (Mint 17.1 Rebecca Mate) going through the learning curve. It's a challenege. Dual boot with Windows 8.1, which provides the motivation!

I have an older Dell Dimension PC with XP. It's old and cranky, but I do love my XP. I want to wipe the hard drive and install a user friendly simple version of Linux that I can reinstall XP into as VM.
I am clueless where to even begin to figure out which version of Linux is best for this aside from the two mentioned below. The PC operatest 2.17 GHz, has 1.25 GB RAM, and a 156 GB Hard Drive.

I tried installing Zorin, both by DVD and USB, but could not get it to install or even work live. Just kept getting the F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup ingfinte loop. Spent a week trying every which way, short of a format, to install Zorin but I just refused to work, despite their excellent suopport.

Also tried every which way to install Robolinux ( all three versions), and again could not get it to install, although I was able to do the Xfce and KLDE versions live. Just went to them for support and it requires a $5 donation per case. Knowing how much supoport I could need, that could really add up.

Any advise is greatly appreciated.
TIA.
Cheers!

neeHello all.

I believe I have decided to go with a Debian as my choice to begin learning again. But everything I have read all talks about xp, 7, vista and the likes. I have seen mention of 8 and 8.1 a couple times. But the info was very vague. So I am questioning myself in my decision based solely on the fact that I really do not want to or have to need to build my distro from the get go. I am completely dumbfounded as to making something work that normally wouldn't. I know I can get through the ISO process to run a live disc. If it is unlikely that Debian will run on my amd64 from a live, then I need to read more I suppose. I figure a good foundation of install without too many "make it work" scenarios would be a good start? Or am I just being paranoid and ignorant?

I tried to install Debian 8 and 7 but I get error message at partitioning stage:

"Failed to create a file system
The ext4 file system creation in partition #1 of SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed."

After that I couldn't advance further.

I booted from a live Debian and the HardDisk actually shows there with some older files on it.

I tried to install even Windows but from the start it shows the computer doesn't have a Hard Disk Drive so the installation stops right at the start.

Any ideas what is wrong and is there any fix?

I just booted my PC in Vector Linux 7.0 Standard Live Edition. It is a bootable version of Linux that requires no installation. I am currently booting of a DVD-RW. The problem I am running into is the default password for root has already been set. It didn't prompt me to create a user or password at any point. In fact the first time I booted it all that happened was the Operating System loaded up. All I have done since them is run a portable netbeans and try to access the hard drive. When I tried to access the hard drive I got the following error.

Authentication is required to mount the device
An application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges. Authentication as the super user is required to perform this action.
Password for root: _______???______

I found a few password suggestions on forms like root and vector, but these didn't work. If you would like to experiment with the OS burn it to DVD. See if you can figure out the solution to the problem. Here is the download link: http://vectorlinux.com/downloads

Hi

I am very suprised! I previously had a Windows 7 desktop, dual boot with Windows Server 2012 R2. I didn't care much about 2012 R2, so I went with a Debian server on another computer.

I wanted to triple boot my computer, so I looked at my BIOS to see if my computer has UEFI support, but it doesnt, so I am not able to boot to GPT. One decision lead to another, and I decided not to install Hackintosh. As part of this process, I had converted it to GPT, and then back to MBR when installing Windows 8.1 Pro. Everything went well.

When I went to install Debian 7, it was not recognizing anything on that drive. I found out it was a backup GUID partition table left over. I used fixparts found on rodsbooks.com, and I fixed the disk partition table.

Now this is where things get weird. Before installing, I created a primary partition for /, and an extended partition with 5 logical partitions inside it. I installed Debian 7 from a live install DVD, and I manually created the partitions. I created a 4GB /, 16GB /usr, 4GB /var, and 64GB /home. Then I left a bunch of free space (~145GB) and then 16GB swap space. (I have 8GB ram, and I plan to hibernate sometimes).

After a successful installation, installation of packages, reboots, and frustration with PCI card problems, I rebooted to Windows 8.1.

Upon opening diskpart gui, I was greeted with the picture attached.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

Hello,

I am looking for a live linux distro that is able to recognize more hardware by "default" without installation. For example, when I borrow a laptop/netbook, I want to be able to boot the live linux distro and be able to have wireless access to internet (at least most of the time).

I know how to get the wireless working if I have internet access to begin with, but sometimes I do not have a wired connection or am not allowed to install stuff.

I would like to try many live distros on different laptops, but it would be hard to convince other people to give me their laptops to do that; so I would really appreciate your help.

Thanks

hi guys,

just a quick one on virtualbox...

could i have centos 7 running virtual box...then host another 3 vm's on it that are running live at the same time?
or is this best for vmware?

i would like centos 7
then another centos7 vm
debian vm
slackware vm (headless)

its a i5 with 8gb RAM...the vm's wont be doing much work,prob ssh into each to setup things and experiment
maybe run a couple of small wordpress web sites...nothing drastic...

any advice on the best way to get this result?

I was trying to do an update using Update Manager and I got the error message:

No space left on device), E:IO Error saving source cache, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I have attached a copy of my disk usage and it shows root as 100%. I thought that I had put the Home folder on it's own partition but I guess not.

I have also included the results of the ls -l command but fail to see what is using the space.

I am using LinuxMint Linux version 3.11-2-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 4.8.1 (Debian 4.8.1-10) ) #1 SMP Debian 3.11.8-1 (2013-11-13)

Thanks for your help in advance.

Hello there,

I tried to install kali alongside windows and did it wrong probably. Now whenever I boot, grub loader sees only Kali and Free-DOS and doesn't see Windows.

I can still see the Windows partition in Kali and access the files however.
Searched online for a solution and saw that boot-repair could help me, however because some new update issue I cannot install it under Kali directly( see below link, it doesnt work for me).
askubuntu.com/questions/449818/cant-find-boot-repair-package-for-the-newest-version-of-ubuntu]

Long story short, I downloaded the iso version of boot-repair and tried to burn it onto a live-usb, but it doesn't load. All I get is a black screen with a terminal line running where I can't do anything.
I burned the iso using the terminal and the command below.
sudo dd bs=4M if=file.iso of=/dev/sdc
I burned the iso using unetbootin a couple of times and the same issue.


Any ideas? am I doing something wrong? How can I burn the iso disk to a live USB to run boot-repair? Or any other alternatives?

PS: first time linux user, I have no idea what am I doing so please be patient with me.





This is my output for running sfdisk -l.

Code:

sfdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *      0+    118     119-    955836    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2      59654   60801-   1148-   9215829    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3        119+  59653   59535- 478214340    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda5        119+  51030   50912- 408950091+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6      58934+  59653     720-   5783368+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7      51031+  58933    7903-  63479131   83  Linux
		start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (855,54,32)
		end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (565,254,63)

Disk /dev/sdb: 1020 cylinders, 240 heads, 62 sectors/track
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
  for C/H/S=*/104/54 (instead of 1020/240/62).
For this listing I'll assume that geometry.
Units = cylinders of 2875392 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *      0+   2704-   2705-   7592960    b  W95 FAT32
		start: (c,h,s) expected (0,37,51) found (0,32,33)
		end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,103,54) found (945,103,54)
/dev/sdb2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

Hello all,

I was going through LFS yesterday and planned to change the symbolic link from "{bin/sh}{dash}" to "{bin/sh}{bash}". Unfortunately, I disconnected from bin/sh but forgot to create another link. Now the system won't boot and failed to shutdown. Wondering if I can make a symbolic link for it on the Live USB or is there another solution? The Distro is Linux Mint 17.1.

Thanks.