Red Hat 7.2 problem

[kook]

Hi.

I'm trying to install RH 7.2 on an old P-120 w/ 32 meg ram and a 1.6 GIG HD. During the part where the image is copied to the hard drive I get the following error message:
"Error transferring the install image to your hard disk. Probably not enough disk space"

I have tried various different package combinations, all less than 1.0 GIG, one even as small as 570 meg, and I get the error at the same exact point in the copy every time.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[fancypiper]

That's a pretty bloated distro.

Check out a smaller distro (peanut maybe? It's rpm based like redhat) or a build from scratch system like Gentoo.

[kook]

Yes,
But all of the package combinations I chose were less than 1.0 GIG, and I have a 1.6 gig drive. Why wouldn't it work? ANd what's with "probably not enough disk space"? "Probably"? You'd think the error message could be a little more descriptive....

[computopia]

If you have a box floating around that has X on it and RH 7.2 just use the kickstart tool to trim down the install to a minimum. I am not sure why it is not installing if it's under 1gig but remember you need space for your /swap and /boot partitions too. Kickstart will let you really prune down RH 7.2 I have pretty much the same hardware you have and before kickstart is would fail because I didn't have room for /swap /boot and all the crap RH sprays onto the HDD. So I booted up my X windows system created a kickstart disk and then reloaded that failed install without issue.

[jglen490]

But all of the package combinations I chose were less than 1.0 GIG, and I have a 1.6 gig drive.
Of the 1.6 GB, how much is reserved for the swap partition and how much for any other partitions that may have been set up?

This is hypothetical, but if you have about 1 GB of software to install and if you have /usr on its own partition and that partition is less than 1 GB, then you could get that error.

Therefore, it's very important to know what the partitioning scheme is for your hard drive. Usually, you can get by with a root partition ("/"), a swap partition, and maybe a boot partition ("/boot"). If your distro does not require /boot to be on its own partition, then don't. Also, with 32MB of RAM, you should have a swap partition of at least 64MB, with probably 145/150MB max.

With that size harddrive you'd be better off not slicing it up too finely because you won't have a lot of room to spare if you guess wrong on a partition size.

[SuperHornet]

jglen490 is right,
If you accepted the default partition scheme which is something like /boot 36Mb /swap 128 / the rest

You should be fine. I saw that you trimmed down the packages to under 1GB but did you tell the installer to install all dependencies?
That could tac on another 500+MB. Also don’t forget about cluster sizes. You may have a 1.6GB dive even at 4k clusters you won’t get the full potential.