Re: Need advice: Compaq Presarios and Debian
On Sat, 16 Dec 2000 03:04:09 Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
| d-man, you might want to set your wrapmargin a bit shorter.
What is the preferred size? I had it at 80, this time it's 70. :-)
| as for lilo, you can have two devices on each ide chain. i assume
| you have
| windows on one hd and linux on another hd. why not just make them
| a
| mast/slave pair on the first IDE chain?
Nice try. Here's what happened when I got my HD and added it to
install Linux :
Original setup, out-of-the-box from Compaq :
Quantum Bigfoot, 8GB, /dev/hda (I'll use the Linux naming since it
is nice and concise)
DVD drive, /dev/hdc
Zip drive, /dev/hdd
floppy , /dev/fd0 (my floppy came on the floppy connector)
My Compaq is a Presario 5035 mini-Tower (very mini!)
I bought a 10GB Maxtor drive (3.5"). My tower only has 4 drive bays:
HD, DVD, Zip, floppy so I intended to leave the disk somewhere but use
it anyways. As it turns out there is just enough room on top of the
power supply and behind the floppy drive that the cover fits on and
you can't tell from the outside.
As for connecting it, the BIOS has no way to manually specify what the
disks are (like older BIOS's on my dad's 286 and 486). Since /dev/hdb
was open I figured I would put the disk there. After a lot of
frustration and rebooting I realized that my BIOS could only recognize
my Maxtor drive if it was in "Cable Select" mode. Of course, I don't
have the special cable that allows 2 disks on it in "Cable Select"
mode. The BIOS wouldn't see it in Master or Slave mode, and then the
BIOS couldn't find the other disk on the bus either. I tried all
combinations of disks together with the Master/Slave configs.
Since the Maxtor drive had to be in Cable Select mode it had to be by
itself on a bus. The BIOS doesn't care about Zip drives so putting it
with the zip drive was equivalent to being by itself. I moved the DVD
drive to /dev/hdb and made it a slave while the 'doze disk is still
/dev/hda.
My current setup:
orig hd : /dev/hda
dvd : /dev/hdb
Linux hd : /dev/hdc
zip : /dev/hdd
|
| boy, everytime i open her computer, i always get the feeling that
| compaq
| didn't just put any thought into working on your computer. they
| specifically
| designed it to discourage you to!
Yes definitely! Not only that, but they put everything except the
modem on the mother board. You can't upgrade or even just replace the
video or sound without needing a new mother board.
As for booting, someone else suggested using a floppy. Yes, Linux can
boot fine with LILO on a floppy, but the floppy had no /dev/hda file
so I couldn't ever boot that other OS. That's why I settled for
loadlin. Fortunately I don't have the need to boot the other OS very
often these days.
-D
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