Newbie installing SuSE 9.1, yast stops on swap space pb

[lisbjørn]

I'm trying to install SuSE 9.1 PRO from a package of purchased CDs.
The installation stops with YaST saying:

Your computer doesn't have enough memory to run YaST.
To continue, activate some swap space.

If I hit continue, I'm prompted for a swap partition such as /dev/sda2.
I've tried with /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 -with or without a /swap appended- but YaST returns with

Error activating swap space.

This regardless of the installation option I choose (manual, with or without ACPI etc), and regardless of starting YaST in text mode or not.

If I run the manual installation, and go to
"main menu > system information > memory", I see the SwapCached, -Total and -Free are all zero!

I have an Intel PentiumII, 350 MHz with 512 KB Cache Ram and 64 MB of RAM.

I know, that I have a hda1 and a hda2, most likely with my windows 98 installation on hda1 (my C drive in DOS). hda1 takes 2G of my 6G harddisk, and has some 700M of free space. hda2 is an extended partition, which until recently had a logical partition named D of 4G, which I used as personal data drive (under SuSE-installation, I believe I saw that as <hda5>).

I tried to set the swap space myself in windows98, but it seems as if YaST doesn't care about windows 98 swap! What do I know?

Then, I thought, that perhabs YaST needed some "non-DOS" space on the HD, and I removed the D drive using fdisk. <hda5> no longer appears during installation, but the outcome is still the same.

fdisk (dos) tells me, that my C partition is a FAT16, whilst the second partition has no letter, is still extended, sized 4G, and no indication of "System" (fat!). Must it be FAT32?

Btw, a downloaded iso image of SuSE 9.1, burned on a CD, gives exactly the same result. That's why I ended up bying an expensive distribution with documentation. Neither the doc on paper, nor the doc on the CD deals with this. Further searches in forums, using google etc, has not given me a useful reply.

Obviously, I'm on the wrong track.
Any reply will be received gratefully and btw, I'm in no haste.

Lisbjørn

[sarumont]

First off, you want to create a partition in that logical drive of about 384M. Then you need to set it to type 82 (Linux swap). You can do this from Linux fdisk or cfdisk. I've never installed SuSE, so I'm not sure how to exactly go about doing this on the install.

If it dumps you to a command prompt after the failed boot, the you can do this:

cfdisk /dev/hda
(make the partition, set the type, save the partition table, exit)
mkswap /dev/hda5
swapon /dev/hda5
(restart installer)

Then you need to set the rest of that empty space to type 83 (Linux). The installer should do this pretty automagically, as that's the space where it's going to install.

Hopefully this will get you started.

[lisbjørn]

- Thanks for your reply, and excuse me for not having reacted until now.

No, I don't get "dumped" to a prompt, unfortunately, but you have anyway put me on a track to investigate -looking for linux provided tools to manipulate the HD from a DOS prompt. I'm currently diving into the docs of the "dosutil/fips" -thing, perhaps this can help me in creating the linux swap partition.

I'll be back when finished reading and hopefully having solved my pb. In any case I'm in a steep learning curve, and that's refreshing.

[sarumont]

You can also check out the Gentoo LiveCD. It will allow you to boot to a command prompt, fdisk and format your partition, and reboot the SuSE installer. Either way, hope it works out for ya.

[lisbjørn]

First thanks for spending time on my pb, secondly please accept my excuses on not having done anything since then

- as already said, I was in no hurry.

The problem solved itself this morning by installing 256MB of additional RAM on my "old" PC ("born" with 64MB). The SUSE and Yast just ran perfect through the whole installation

Again, thanks a lot
L. Isbjørn