Re: Debian install on the Ricoh g1200s - MBR issues
At 04:21 PM 2/5/01 -0800, you wrote:
Peter Howell wrote:
> As if life isn't hard enough, I've gone and bought a g1200s and
am trying
> to put linux on it. For those of you who aren't familiar with this
> machine, it's a tablet computer with a pcmcia hard drive and a cdrom. I
> can plug in a keyboard and mouse for the setup procedure, but my eventual
> goal is to get the diffs loaded which will allow me to use xscribble for
> handwriting recognition on the pressure sensitive screen.
>
> Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get past the install. I
have an
> ibm-pc110 with a floppy drive that I have used to install the latest stable
> base distribution of debian onto a viper 260mb type III hard drive. I had
> it put LILO on the MBR, but I still needed the floppy for the reboot. This
> is going to be a problem as the g1200s has no floppy drive.
>
One question that is asked during the installation procedure is whether
you want to
make the hard drive bootable. This may be a stupid question, and I have
no wich to
offend, but did you do that?
None taken. I did specify that I wanted the drive to be
bootable. It asked me where to install the mbr program, which confused me
a bit since I usually think of mbr as referring to "master boot record." I
went with the default which was to put it on the target partition. When I
boot, I get:
MBR
L 07 07 07 .....
and the 07's continue in what is apparently an infinite loop. If I hold
down shift I get the
MBR 1FA:
prompt, but I'm having a hard time finding out what I can do from there.
>
> The immediate problem is that I can't access the Microsolutions
backpack
> cdrom on the parallel port. I instructed the system to load the paride
> module. The module appears to be loaded when I reboot, but when I got to
> apt configuration, the cdrom isn't detected. It then asks me to enter the
> file I wish to use to access the cdrom. This is where I'm stuck. I don't
> know which file it's talking about. module, device mount point...? Like I
> said, I'm stuck.
>
Can the machine normally boot off a cdrom? If you installed from a cdrom, you
should be able to boot off that one.
Second (sorry, third) question, what's the make of the cdrom? Is it
non-standard?
Did you include it in the kernel?
Alas, no. It's a parallel port cdrom. That's why I loaded
paride.o. Unfortunately, I think there are a couple other packages I
should have also loaded, but I don't know what they are. The model # is
166550.
I was still able to get the base system installed via the floppies and I
can boot with the aid of the boot floppy. Getting the rest of the packages
installed has become a secondary concern right now. If I can get the drive
to boot, then I can drop it into the ricoh, which has a cdrom with a
somewhat more standard laptop ide interface and hopefully I'll have more
luck mounting that. Right now the trick seems to be getting it to boot.
Thanks for the help
Peter
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