Re: P-II ASUS box won't boot another drive
On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 01:48:48PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
> On 10/02/2007 11:48 AM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> >
> >I bought an 8 GB drive for my P-II so that I don't have to scrimp so
> >much when installing (see previous theads). I also found a 1.1 GB
> >drive. The box used to have an 8 GB drive that died last year.
> >
> >This computer seems very picky over what drives it will actually boot.
> >The origional 8 GB and the new 8GB drive are the same WD. The 1.1 GB is
> >also a WD. Of the drives, it will only boot an 850 MB Quantum.
> >
> >I tried all the different geometry settings (NORMAL, LBA, LARGE) and
> >reinstalled Etch and OpenBSD each time. No boots. Put in the 850 MB,
> >install Etch, boots OK.
> >
> >Has anyone run into this before? My IBM PS/ValuePoint 486 will boot
> >all of the drives no problem.
> >
> >As it is now, my 486 has the two WD drives so has lots of room for OBSD
> >(since Etch won't install).
> >
> Beware of the 1024th-cylinder limit on machines like those. Create a
> small (<512MB) /boot partition to contain the kernel and other files for
> booting.
>
> If /boot doesn't work, try using Lilo rather than Grub.
>
> If Lilo fails, create a MSDOS partition at the head of the disk and
> install syslinux onto it; see if you can get syslinux to boot the OS
> (this might be moderately challenging, since syslinux is designed for
> boot floppies).
>
> If syslinux fails, consider wiping the MBR and attempting the install
> all over again.
>
> There are also some more exotic boot loaders available with Debian, chas
> and palo.
>
> I wish you well on your adventures with old equipment :-)
I did a full wipe of the entire drive before trying. Note that the BSD
bootloaders wouldn't work either. And yes, I used a 32 MB /boot
partition for debian, and for OpenBSD I put the whole / (contains the
kernel) in 500 MB.
Note that there is no problem on my 486.
Doug.
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