Problems with Packard Bell
Hi! I have just acquired in my possession a Packard Bell
computer with a 1.2 GB hard drive and 72 MB of RAM. I am
trying to load Debian on it. I downloaded the CD images
from a cdimage.debian.org, and burned them with my
cd-burner using xcdroast. I verified the images twice
and used them to install Slink on a friend's computer.
When I first tried to install Slink on the Packard Bell
computer, I had to use three different Driver floppies
before I found one that wasn't flaky. Once I did that,
I booted into the setup program and proceeded to install
Slink and erase the windows partition. Because I was
impatient at the time, I neglected to scan the hard
drive for bad-blocks. I used the SBPCD module for
the proprietary CD-ROM drive.
When I booted into the new system, things started going
wrong. dselect and anything that used perl started
giving me segfaults every time I tried to run them.
Then, I got an EXT@ PANIC from the kernel indicating
that the filesystem was bad. I ran fsck -c a couple
of times, but no cigar.
Next, I reinstalled from scratch. Everything went OK,
and I did a badblocks scan on the hard drive. While
that was running, I used kernel-package to build
a 2.2.4 kernel for the Packard Bell, including
the bare-bones and the SBPCD module. The base
system installed fine, but when I rebooted, the
cd drive started giving me errors in the middle
of the dselect "Update" mode. The errors complained
of read timeouts on the drive. I crossed my fingers
and installed the 2.2.4 kernel from a floppy, only
to reboot and see pages of hex codes at the time
init usually starts /bin/login.
I rebooted again, and everything seemed OK. DSelect
liked my CD if I told it it was a single cd, not
part of a multi-cd set. I started installing the
"standard" packages when the CD drive crapped out.
I'm at a loss about what to do at this point. Should
I remove the memory and hard drive and throw the
system in the trash? Anyone have any tips about
troubleshooting SBPCD? The system in general appears
flaky, can anyone help?
--
Stephen Pitts
smpitts@midsouth.rr.com
webmaster - http://www.mschess.org
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