[Wylug-help] Installing on ancient systems?

[Anne Wilson]

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On Saturday 01 May 2004 17:59, you wrote:
>
> I've recently installed Debain/Unstable on my ancient PII-400 with
> 192MB of RAM without problems, booting from a jidgo-made ISO.
> Whether or not you class Debian as "user-friendly" or not, I am
> unsure.
>
Yes, I installed Mandrake 9.1 on an AMD-400 system, and everything was
OK.  I wanted to give away the P300 system, though, not the AMD-400
system which I wanted to keep for experimentation.  Ah well, maybe it's
not possible.  I hate waste, and I can't give it away with the old
windows setup on it, but it would be perfectly good enough for someone
that just wanted to do a bit of office work and Internet browsing.

> Sounds like it could be a misconfiguration within the BIOS.  Try
> setting the CDROM drive in the BIOS config to "CDROM" or "ATAPI"
> rather than "Auto".  I had an old P200 motherboard that used to treat
> my CDROM drive as a hard drive if it was set to auto -- this might
> cause problems if your linux bootup looks to load startup filesystem
> from /dev/cdrom rather than /dev/hdc (or whatever).
>
I think you may have hit it there.  This is an old award bios, and there
is no option to do that - just auto, user and none, as in dos days.  It
looks as though it is being treated as a hdd.  I guess that when this
was new cdwriters will still not common, never mind anything more
exotic, and treating a cdrom as a hdd sounded ok.

> Also make sure BIOS is set to boot from CDROM then from HDD-0.  You
> will probably need to hit Enter at some stage during boot-up to
> confirm you wish to boot from the CD.
>
Yes, I had set it so.  It doesn't look to me as though this is going to
be possible.  I can't see any likelihood of bios upgrades for something
as old as this.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.  It does help clear thinking to get
another mind on the problem :-)

Anne
- --
Registered Linux User No.293302
Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?
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