Hello from another newbie! I don't know exactly how noobish you are (i consider myself "just past the noob level" myself), so you might already know some of this, but here's some noob advice anyway:
- First of all, a general recommendation: read up! When you read a guide and you find a word, a command or a process you don't understand, look it up. Try search engines, wikipedia, linux man pages.
Your problem seems to be with the boot process:
"After install and reboot, if I don't have a CD in the drive, I just get a short message that I assume means the BIOS can't find an OS, something like: "Reboot and select proper boot device"."
...so i'd recommend starting out with looking up BIOS, MBR, linux bootloaders and the boot process in wikipedia, and also here on the SliTaz website.
Directly to the quote above: BIOS doesn't boot the OS directly, but through a boot loader, e.g. Grub. With your setup, you need to have some kind of boot(loader) code installed to the MBR of your hard disk, otherwise it's not a "boot device" but just a storage volume. Additionally, there needs to be some kind of bootloader installed on the partition you are trying to boot (typically it's the same one, but not necessarily; The most typical exception to this is if you have $Wind£€dows and Linux on two partitions on the same computer). Additionally, the configurations of the bootloader need to be right.
Of course, all of this should be taken care of by the auto-installer if you just choose the option to install bootloader (Grub), and it can also be done manually as described in the Handbook's installation guide ( http://doc.slitaz.org/en:handbook:installation#grub-boot-loader ). But as there's clearly a problem somewhere, i could think of the following possible reasons:
1. For some exotic reason, your BIOS is configured to disallow booting the internal hdd (!?!). Quite unlikely and strange, but try going to the BIOS settings at startup, and check what the boot options/configurations are, just in case.
2. There's no boot code in the harddisk's MBR. Either no bootloader is installed at all, or it's just installed to your hard disk partition but not to MBR. Recommended reading: GRUB's documentation on installation to MBR. Find it on teh net. (The manual way of installing GRUB which is described in the SliTaz install handbook should work as is, but it's always good to read up...)
3. Some problem in the bootloader configurations.
Boot up with a live medium (e.g. your SliTaz cd),
mount the hd partition (recommended reading: mount command, e.g. http://doc.slitaz.org/en:handbook:commands#mount-a-partition-cd-or-usb-drive . Also, see below re: /mnt/target .)
(The partition is probably /dev/hda1 in your case, but might also be /dev/sda1 - look up which it is e.g. with Gparted, Mountbox, or the command fdisk -l ),
and check the menu.lst in the directory <mountpoint-eg-mnt/target>/boot/grub . It should have an entry like the one in the installation guide.
If the menu.lst looks alright, check the device.map (recommended reading: look this up in the GRUB documentation). It's fairly unlikely that the problem is there though, menu.lst is the first place to check.
4. Faulty install. Try reinstalling GRUB to the harddisk via the LiveCD. See the manual install manual.
5. "I tried to go to the directory it said, but there's no "boot" directory in "/mnt/target"; in fact, there's nothing. Could this be a problem? When I attempted to install grub as it said, I was not successful."
/mnt/target is just a temporary directory created on /mnt for mounting the hd partition for the installation process. Try opening Mountbox to check which devices are mounted, and if /dev/hda1 is not, then mount it again on /mnt/target or whatever other temporary mountpoint you want to create:
mkdir /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids
then
ls /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids
and you should see the filesystem on your harddisk partition. For as long as /dev/hda1 is mounted, you'll find your device.map and menu.lst in /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids/boot/grub. You can view and edit them, or create them if they are missing, with
leafpad /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids/boot/grub/menu.lst
leafpad /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids/boot/grub/device.map
when you're done checking and editing, unmount with
umount /mnt/ieatbunniespigletsandsmallkids
or with Mountbox.
If you have more troubles, i'm happy to try to help out another noob :)
- wolfpup
