ED HAYES

I downloaded the Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution, and Linux E-Business r12 installer from Oracle.  I am sure RCN Cable loves that I have now downloaded over 100 GB in the last 4 days.   After my Windows Server 2003 debacle, I decided to run the Windows Vista recovery CDs I made to reinstall Vista the way it came from Gateway.  That way I would know the exact network drivers and such.

Hard Drive Imaging

Before I installed Linux I wanted to make an image of my hard drive so that I wouldn’t have to go through the painful Vista setup again.  That was a process in itself.  My final solution was getting GPart, a bootable partition manager, and running it on a USB Jump Drive.  What a wondrous solution!  By far the best experience I have had during my Oracle Instillation process.  I was able to copy my Windows Vista partition from my internal hard disk to my external USB hard disk rather simply.

Linux and USB Hard Drives

I was a bit confused when installing Linux, but I was able to get through it.  And it booted and worked without any problems.  It even found my wired network interface card (NIC) *GASP*!  So far so good!

This is where the pain started.  Oracle was on a USB drive!  At first I connected it and nothing happened.  I tried searching the net and doing the whole mount thing, and I pretty much gave up after looking at this guide on mounting a USB drive in Linux and having zero luck. I tried getting the data through “Windows Networking” on my iMac.  It worked at first, but then something happened, and it stopped?  I still don’t know how to get it working again. BUT I found the solution to my USB drive problem!

First, I don’t know why it didn’t mount before, but it mounted after a reboot, and I could see all the files I had stored on the external USB hard drive.  But, as I should expect at this point, I had a problem.  I could not execute any files on the drive for some reason.  I am not a Linux expert, I wouldn’t even say I am a novice at this point. So I copied all my files over to my system disk and started the instillation from there. To get the Oracle E-business installer going I had to use terminal to launch it.  I browsed to the path the Oracle installer was at and used this command to launch the installer once I was in the rapidwiz folder.:

./rapidwiz

Wouldn’t you know it, I failed a test!  The storage space test!  I continued anyway; failed instillation of coarse.  I reinstalled Linux to start from scratch.  I also found a solution to my problem of executing from a USB drive!

The external file system was only half mounted or something.  I went back to my mounting a USB drive in Linux guide and figured out my problem!  I was using /sda1, /sda2, or /sda3.  Those are the partitions 1, 2, and 3 on storage device A!  I wanted partition 2 on storage device B.  So I tried:

mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/usbdrive

My command processed  with out an error!  I felt invincible at this point!  I launched rapidwiz and started the instillation once again.