I am trying to install Debian 2.1 and I can't get the initial console to load. I have an old Packard Bell 486sx 16 with 8 MB of ram and a 120MB hard drive. Obviously it has no SCSI, PCI, or anything else that's up to date. The machine isn't really good for anything but familiarizing myself with Linux, which I hope it can do. I am trying to load from the DOS partition after which I intended to run fdisk etc. and complete the installation. I figured this should work because the install.bat appears to be calling a ram drive (loadlin linux root=/dev/ram initrd=root.bin). The system DOES have 128K of shadow ram which I can't disable. It gets through the device searches, mounts the root read-only, but then crashes with the above message. The S.u.S.E. support database has something about the wrong root partition but I don't know if that applies here (it seems it should work from ram). The only other errors of significance I get are the "No BIOS32 extensions present. This release still depends on it." for eata_dma and eata_pio and a failure to load an NLS charset (something like cp437 - I can't remember off the top of my head). I did try the pci=off parameter but that didn't change anything. I have NO unix or linux experience, but am familiar with the DOS and windows boot processes and Linux appears to be doing a lot of the same things with different syntax. I went ahead and ran FIPS since this error and created a 20MB DOS partition with the rest dedicated to Linux. I may create a swap file later but would like to get through an install first. Is my machine hopeless or is the 2.1 kernel calling something my machine can't handle that could be disabled? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
