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I know just enough UNIX command line to get me into trouble here...

Specs:  Zenith laptop with 4 MB RAM and a 385 MB HDD
I surprised myself and wiped Windows 3.1 off the drive with a nifty drive wiper app
Also, surprisingly, I managed to get BL3 onto 2 good Floppies and they boot up the laptop into that 4 MB RAM.
Now I'm stuck.
When BL3 loads, some of the boot scripting shows the HD partition as "hda: hda1"
Are a minimum of 2 partitions needed? 1 main one for the OS and 1 for Swap, or is 1 large partition sufficient?
Finally, it seemed like both the partition and the file system were correctly set up to run the "install-to-hd" command, but I got a message about not finding a fs
So, I tried to run the fs creation on hda1, like this:
/# mke2fs /dev/hda1

The output was:
mke2fs 1.10, 24-Apr-97 for EXT2 F2 0.5b, 95/08/09
VM: killing process mke2fs
Killed
Unable to handle virtual paging request at virtual address 8dc9048d

Seems like I'm running out of RAM and/or Virtual Memory.  What steps to I have to take to get BL3 loaded onto the drive?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.