Re: Unable to make Linux bootable from HD or make boot floppy
Hi, Mark.
You, presumably a total Linux-newbie have set yourself up
with a daunting task trying to install not-the-most-hand-
holding distribution on _really_ancient_ hardware. If you
get it working you'll have something to write home about...
On Sat, 2002-06-15 at 20:58, Mark Fickett wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am working on installing Debian 2.2r6 on a Packard Bell
> Intel machine, which has a Pheonix BIOS, 23.0MB RAM, a 428MB
23MB RAM? That's odd. Is 1MB "stolen" for the video adapter?
> Hard Drive, a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive, and a Matsushita CD-ROM
> drive (as well as a keyboard, mouse, monitor, two COM ports,
> two telephone ports, etc). I'm completely new to Debian, and
> have very little experience with PCs (I'm usually a Mac person),
> so I'm not sure what I need to include; I'll just try to give
> as much information as I can.
>
> I am installing from a rescue floppy created from the rescue.bin
> file on the official binary Debian 2.2r6 CDs (which I purchased
> from TuxCDs), which uses linux 2.2.19. Installation seems to
> go all in order until I reach the point at which it asks to
> either make Linux bootable directly from the hard drive or creat
> a boot floppy, at which point neither works.
>
> When configuring device driver support, I install sbpcd for my
> matsushita CD-ROM drive, and have tried also installing de-floppy,
Are you sure the matsushita it plugged into the Sound Blaster
card?
> linear, raid0, raid1, raid5 in hopes of helping the floppy drive,
> but with no change in results. I then install the base system
That's just flailing (but makes one feel good to "just do something").
> from the first Debian CD (extracted from
> /instmnt/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/base2_2.tgz).
> The drive was giving me problems before (rawrite2.exe gave me
> "general failure reading drive D" several times, but would go
Drive _D:_??? rawrite2.exe should be writing to A: or B:.
> on after retrying), when I was trying to make the rescue and
> device driver floppies, but doesn't seem to cause any problems
> here. The Debian CD seems to be fine, however; on another
> computer, rawrite2.exe had no problems.
>
> When I try to make Linux bootable directly from the HD, either
> option (the MBR on /dev/hda, the only hard drive, or on /dev/hda1,
> my boot partition) fails, saying that "LILO wasn't able to install ...
> the most common reason why LILO fails is trying to boot a kernel
> that resides at a location on the disk higher than the 1023rd
> cylinder" ... etc. My partition scheme, however, has both the
> boot and the root partitions well under the 1023rd cylinder; I
> don't think I even have 1024 cylinders. (The partitions are
> /hda1, which is 10MB at the beginning of the disk, a Primary linux
> ex2 partition marked bootable and mounted as boot, /hda2, a
> 30MB Primary linux ext2 partition which is root, and a 388MB
> Linux Swap partition, also Primary.)
This must be changed. On a very small disk like this, try this:
hda2: Primary ext2 48MB _at_the_end_of_the_disk_
hda1: Primary swap Everything else, and make it bootable...
> When I try to make a boot floppy, it asks for a blank floppy, says
> "creating a filesystem on the floppy...", and then (after the floppy
> drive makes a short noise) says "Creation of the boot floppy failed. >
> Please make sure that the floppy was not write-proteced, and that you
> put it in the first floppy drive. Try another floppy if the problem
> persists." I have tried with several floppies, none of which have been
Could the floppy drive be whacked after this long?
> write protected, and all of which have gone into the first (and only)
> floppy drive. I've tried both freshly formatted for PC, as well as old
> Mac-formatted disks. When I check Ctrl-Alt-F3, I see:
>
[snip]
> Hopefully I've not been too exhaustive. Many thanks,
> -Mark
HTH,
Ron
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ron Johnson, Jr. Home: ron.l.johnson@cox.net |
| Jefferson, LA USA http://ronandheather.dhs.org:81 |
| |
| "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea |
| which could only have originated in California." |
| --Edsger Dijkstra |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
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