[Nottingham] BIG disk bootup fun

[Martin]

Folks,

As a nlug_party 'exercise', I put a very big new disk into a very old 
machine... (Story follows (:-))


To get the 250GByte drive in the old machine here to boot was 
'interesting'. Mandrake 10.1 installed fine, and then failed on the 
reboot into the newly installed system. The BIOS doesn't find the drive, 
not even the first 8GB.

A workaround is to use MandrakeMove (mkbootdisk is included (:-)), and 
modify a more recent version of the mkbootdisk script to look up the 
mounted partitions details, and then:

mkbootdisk --iso --verbose --device bootcd.iso 2.6.8.1-12mdk

(or whatever kernel was installed.)

The ramdisk image boots off a burnt CD-R and then runs thereafter off 
the HDD.

(A 1.44MB floppy disk is too small for the ~1.9MB image, and there's no 
boot from USB supported.)


Still might have been easier to put in a new motherboard and CPU (:-/)

Aside: A cheap CD-R disk lasts 'not very long' in a x54 speed CDROM! 
Multiple radial cracks soon appear (:-((


Or is there a still easier way?

Regards,
Martin


-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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