Hi, I had a go at installing debian today and it did not go well. After the first detection and partition setup finished it rebooted, fine, that is right up until this point.

I found that all my other partitions had gone and only the linux partitions remained.

So I booted into the mos cd and in scsiconfig I found that debian had installed a MBR for some reason. The mos partitions are still there, I can access them from the mos cd but the smartfirmware can not see them.

Now, I know hdwrite will fix this, but will it leave my mos partitions intact?

ps I should ask this at ppczone, but, while i'm here, the debian installion process was running in a very low res, i'm talking ~320x200 here. Everything was very hard to read as the installation process could only show to lines of text at a time at about 20 chars across. Is this normal? Why didn't it default to standard VGA?

Thank-you for you time.

[ Edited by MaSC on 2005/5/9 15:02 ]

[ Edited by MaSC on 2005/5/9 16:50 ]

if you do it properly then your mos partitions will stay intact. If you do it wrong you kill everything.


morphos:> hdwrite ?
Device/A,Unit/A/N,File/A,Sector/A/N,SectorSize/N:
e.g.
hdwrite ide.device unit 1 mossys:c/reboot sector 0

this will write the reboot tool (as it's a file below 1024 bytes) to sector 0 of your hd (the place where the MBR lives).

Make sure you write a file which is smaller than 1024 bytes, else you kill more than you want.

regards,
tokai