Re: P-II ASUS box won't boot another drive
On 10/02/2007 11:48 AM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
Hello all,
I bought an 8 GB drive for my P-II so that I don't have to scrimp so
much when installing (see previous theads). I also found a 1.1 GB
drive. The box used to have an 8 GB drive that died last year.
This computer seems very picky over what drives it will actually boot.
The origional 8 GB and the new 8GB drive are the same WD. The 1.1 GB is
also a WD. Of the drives, it will only boot an 850 MB Quantum.
I tried all the different geometry settings (NORMAL, LBA, LARGE) and
reinstalled Etch and OpenBSD each time. No boots. Put in the 850 MB,
install Etch, boots OK.
Has anyone run into this before? My IBM PS/ValuePoint 486 will boot
all of the drives no problem.
As it is now, my 486 has the two WD drives so has lots of room for OBSD
(since Etch won't install).
Doug.
Beware of the 1024th-cylinder limit on machines like those. Create a
small (<512MB) /boot partition to contain the kernel and other files for
booting.
If /boot doesn't work, try using Lilo rather than Grub.
If Lilo fails, create a MSDOS partition at the head of the disk and
install syslinux onto it; see if you can get syslinux to boot the OS
(this might be moderately challenging, since syslinux is designed for
boot floppies).
If syslinux fails, consider wiping the MBR and attempting the install
all over again.
There are also some more exotic boot loaders available with Debian, chas
and palo.
I wish you well on your adventures with old equipment :-)
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