Hi, Mark. You, presumably a total Linux-newbie have set yourself up with a daunting task trying to install not-the-most-hand- holding distribution on _really_ancient_ hardware. If you get it working you'll have something to write home about...
On Sat, 2002-06-15 at 20:58, Mark Fickett wrote: > Hello, > > I am working on installing Debian 2.2r6 on a Packard Bell > Intel machine, which has a Pheonix BIOS, 23.0MB RAM, a 428MB 23MB RAM? That's odd. Is 1MB "stolen" for the video adapter? > Hard Drive, a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive, and a Matsushita CD-ROM > drive (as well as a keyboard, mouse, monitor, two COM ports, > two telephone ports, etc). I'm completely new to Debian, and > have very little experience with PCs (I'm usually a Mac person), > so I'm not sure what I need to include; I'll just try to give > as much information as I can. > > I am installing from a rescue floppy created from the rescue.bin > file on the official binary Debian 2.2r6 CDs (which I purchased > from TuxCDs), which uses linux 2.2.19. Installation seems to > go all in order until I reach the point at which it asks to > either make Linux bootable directly from the hard drive or creat > a boot floppy, at which point neither works. > > When configuring device driver support, I install sbpcd for my > matsushita CD-ROM drive, and have tried also installing de-floppy, Are you sure the matsushita it plugged into the Sound Blaster card? > linear, raid0, raid1, raid5 in hopes of helping the floppy drive, > but with no change in results. I then install the base system That's just flailing (but makes one feel good to "just do something"). > from the first Debian CD (extracted from > /instmnt/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/base2_2.tgz). > The drive was giving me problems before (rawrite2.exe gave me > "general failure reading drive D" several times, but would go Drive _D:_??? rawrite2.exe should be writing to A: or B:. > on after retrying), when I was trying to make the rescue and > device driver floppies, but doesn't seem to cause any problems > here. The Debian CD seems to be fine, however; on another > computer, rawrite2.exe had no problems. > > When I try to make Linux bootable directly from the HD, either > option (the MBR on /dev/hda, the only hard drive, or on /dev/hda1, > my boot partition) fails, saying that "LILO wasn't able to install ... > the most common reason why LILO fails is trying to boot a kernel > that resides at a location on the disk higher than the 1023rd > cylinder" ... etc. My partition scheme, however, has both the > boot and the root partitions well under the 1023rd cylinder; I > don't think I even have 1024 cylinders. (The partitions are > /hda1, which is 10MB at the beginning of the disk, a Primary linux > ex2 partition marked bootable and mounted as boot, /hda2, a > 30MB Primary linux ext2 partition which is root, and a 388MB > Linux Swap partition, also Primary.) This must be changed. On a very small disk like this, try this: hda2: Primary ext2 48MB _at_the_end_of_the_disk_ hda1: Primary swap Everything else, and make it bootable... > When I try to make a boot floppy, it asks for a blank floppy, says > "creating a filesystem on the floppy...", and then (after the floppy > drive makes a short noise) says "Creation of the boot floppy failed. > > Please make sure that the floppy was not write-proteced, and that you > put it in the first floppy drive. Try another floppy if the problem > persists." I have tried with several floppies, none of which have been Could the floppy drive be whacked after this long? > write protected, and all of which have gone into the first (and only) > floppy drive. I've tried both freshly formatted for PC, as well as old > Mac-formatted disks. When I check Ctrl-Alt-F3, I see: > [snip] > Hopefully I've not been too exhaustive. Many thanks, > -Mark HTH, Ron -- +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ron Johnson, Jr. Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | Jefferson, LA USA http://ronandheather.dhs.org:81 | | | | "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea | | which could only have originated in California." | | --Edsger Dijkstra | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
