On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 12:02:52PM -0700, Craig Jones wrote: | I have an old 386 on which I am trying to do an FTP install of potato. | The NIC inside is a Western Digital and seems to be functioning all right | (I got linux going from one of those floppy distributions, set everything | up and was able to ping everywhere and log in to a computer at work. So | the NIC and cabling are working all right.) | | When I boot off of the rescue/root/driver-1.bin files, everything goes all | right until it tries to do a modprobe on the wd.o module. The default for | that module is right as I checked it doing a ftp install using RedHat and | the NIC worked. But, under Debian it keeps coming up device is not | working and it might be an IO/IRQ problem. | | Any ideas on what I can try? The NIC does work. The IO/IRQ etc "should" | be right, but that boot version of linux just does not want to modprobe.
Alt-Ctrl-F2 will take you to a shell (as root) where you can run commands and see what is/isn't there. I don't know how much of a system you will have or at what point comming from floppies. I have an NE2000 clone ISA NIC in an old 486. When I tried to load the module it complained that ISA cards _need_ to have the base io specified. PCI cards are nicer because they figure it out for you. I tried 0x300 (I don't know why that number popped in my head, maybe I saw it a couple days before when I turned of PnP with the DOS util) and it seems to work. The module loaded and pick IRQ3. I haven't had a second machine on the network simultaneously to really test it, but the switch's LED's blinked when I tried to ping a (nonexistant) host. I would suggest switching to the "F2" console (as above) and trying : modprobe wd io=0x300 (or insmod wd io=0x300) and seeing what it does/says. Another option would be to put the hd into a newer machine and install from there. I had to do this with that 486 because it couldn't boot from the cd drive I borrowed (old bios) and DOS sucks (no cd driver to let me use loadlin). -D
