Re: laptop problems

[zelinsky@us.net (David S. Zelinsky)]

Thanks for your help, Bruce.

(In reference to an earlier thread: how can anyone complain about a project
leader who actually answers users' questions?)

Bruce Perens <bruce@debian.org> writes:

 > > But with some experimenting, I discovered that telling the BIOS to
 > > disable both primary and secondary cache, I was able to get Linux to
 > > load, and all went well after that.
 > 
 > Turn it back on now, and see if it boots from hard disk with the cache on.

Nope.

 > ... This causes the kernel to die just after it starts because it reads
 > incorrect data out of the cache. If this is what is happening try the
 > "tecra" kernel, or build your own kernel as a "zImage" rather than
 > "bzImage".

I built a zImage -- that worked!

 > > 3) What affect does not disabling shadow RAM?  ...
 > 
 > ... Second, if you have shadow RAM mapped over I/O devices (many
 > motherboards will do that if you ask them to), accesses to those devices
 > will not work.

So if all the devices seem to work, does that mean I won't have any problem
with the shadow RAM?  Is there some way to be sure about this?

 > > Another curiosity: When I went to run fips to shrink the win95 partition,
 > > I found, instead of just one large partition, there were four partitions:
 > > The first was almost the full 2 GB, the second and third were empty (zero
 > > length), and the fourth was 4 MB, but of "unknown" type. ...
 > 
 > That 4MB partition could be a boot manager partition, especially if you've
 > tried NT or have installed System Commander or its ilk. It might also be
 > for saving the system state when you suspend, but I'd expect it to be
 > bigger if that's the case. My Toshiba saves the state by continuing RAM
 > power at all times and does not use a disk partition for this.

The machine came with Windows95; I didn't load any special boot manager.  I
also thought it might be for the system state, but I also decided it was too
small (16 MB -> 4 MB partition??), and there's a Win95 file in hda1 that's for
that purpose.  I guess I'll try deleting it and see what happens!

Thanks again.

-David

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
   David S. Zelinsky
dsz@alumni.caltech.edu
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


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