Hi,
Installing SUSE 11.0 on an HPN3210 with Win98SE. I am using the OpenSUSE 11.0 GNOME Live CD.
Disk puts opening screens, etc., then stalls at the following:
input: SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad as/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2
Nothing further happens. Burned the CD twice, CD is fine.
Thanks.
Alan
ostrowlaw wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Installing SUSE 11.0 on an HPN3210 with Win98SE. I am using the
> OpenSUSE 11.0 GNOME Live CD.
>
> Disk puts opening screens, etc., then stalls at the following:
>
> input: SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad
> as/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2
>
> Nothing further happens. Burned the CD twice, CD is fine.
I know what is wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it.
OpenSUSE 11.0 doesn’t load some or all of the “legacy” IDE drivers,
thus your hard drive is not available. The same thing happens to one
of my old laptops. As the latest 11.1 alpha and beta 1 have not
provided Live CD images, I don’t know if it has been fixed.
Larry
Perhaps this will help (follow the links, too) . . .
Frozen synaptics touchpad - openSUSE Forums
To just get yourself installed, you may need the DVD. Or, install KDE, fix the X Server control file for this touchpad, and then install Gnome (this is ref’d in the links).
All the drivers and config utilities are there, it’s a matter of getting things set up enough in the first place so that you can make the tweaks needed.
I burned a KDE Live CD and I had the same error message. This laptop only has a CD Rom Drive, no DVD. So then I used a portable DVD and booted it up, put in the DVD and installed the windows software. When I rebooted, I received an error message telling me that the partition had a unknown file format.
Trouble with installation?
Sorry, I don’t follow. You put in the openSUSE DVD and installed the windows software??? And at reboot, exactly what was it that returned the partition error message (if unsure please describe)?
Also, is this laptop >5 yrs old, has a 4GB or 6GB hard drive?
Sorry, I guess I was unclear. The laptop is about 8 years old, has a 4 GIG hard drive with Windows 98SE installed. I was planning to use the entire hard drive for Linux. It has a CD ROM drive, not a DVD, so I attached an external DVD drive, booted up Windows 98, then clicked on the external DVD drive. Win98 recognized the drive and saw an installation program, which I clicked on and it installed a linux boot loader on the Win98 partition. When I rebooted, the boot loader gave the error message, i.e., that it could not recognize the format of the hard drive.
OK, that helps. Need some further elaboration, pls:
You booted into the Live-CD and chose installation from the desktop icon, which proceeded . . . or you booted into W98, used the file manager to view the contents of the CD, found the installation executable, clicked on it and that launched the installation which proceeded. Right? (Which?)
Now, when you got to the disk partitioning step, the installer by default would have offered to preserve the Windows partition(s), and probably offered to shrink them because with that drive Windows fully occupied the disk. Did you accept that suggestion, or did you enter the partitioning dialog and instruct openSUSE to delete the Windows partitions and create/format its own?
And did the installation go all the way to completion; if so, do you remember seeing the Touchpad getting set up?
The “could not recognize format of hard drive”: This is critical. Did you get that message after the (green) openSUSE boot message displayed and you hit Enter to boot? Or did you get this message before any boot menu appeared?
At this point, I suspect the problem is the drive partitioning set up (there are some unique issues with hardware that old). We need to know what the disk partitioning layout is now. I gather that the machine could not start up fully from the Live-CD? (Not the installation, just the CD’s desktop environment.) If not, do you have a W98 or DOS boot floppy (you can download this stuff)? If you can boot and run fdisk from the command line it will show you the partition table.
By the way, how much RAM does that machine have?
I should have also mentioned . . . go into the bios setup and find the IDE disk drive settings. If there is a choice called “Large” or “LBA”, try both. Try a setting other than “auto”, if available. That in itself may solve the problem. (This all has to do with drive geometries and how they were calculated, or more accurately, translated, to work around limitations at the time your machine was built.)
Thanks for your help. Let me answer in order:
You booted into the Live-CD and chose installation from the desktop icon, which proceeded . . . or you booted into W98, used the file manager to view the contents of the CD, found the installation executable, clicked on it and that launched the installation which proceeded. Right? (Which?)
==> Actually,I tried both. First I tried installation with the Live CD that I had downloaded, tried both Gnome & KDE versions. Then I tried, the full DVD (I had purchased the set from Novell complete with manual, etc) by piggybacking an external DVD drive.
Now, when you got to the disk partitioning step, the installer by default would have offered to preserve the Windows partition(s),* * *
==> The Live CD never got to that point, as I had stated, it froze at the error message: “input: SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad as/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2” That’s as far as it got!
The “could not recognize format of hard drive”: This is critical. Did you get that message after the (green) openSUSE boot message displayed and you hit Enter to boot? Or did you get this message before any boot menu appeared?
==> I received this error message only when I tried to run the installation program off the DVD. When I rebooted, I received the message.
By the way, how much RAM does that machine have?
==> 512K
I should have also mentioned . . . go into the bios setup and find the IDE disk drive settings. If there is a choice called “Large” or “LBA”, try both. Try a setting other than “auto”, if available. That in itself may solve the problem. (This all has to do with drive geometries and how they were calculated, or more accurately, translated, to work around limitations at the time your machine was built.)
==> I’ll try this but I’m not too hopeful.
Thanks
Alan