[Wylug-help] Installing on ancient systems?

[Jim Jackson]

On Sat, 1 May 2004, Nick Jeffery wrote:

> Anne Wilson wrote:
> > Maybe I'm just asking too much, but I wondered whether it would be
> > possible to put a user-friendly distro onto a system with a celeron 300
> > and 128MB ram.  I thought the best thing to do was to boot knoppix, but
> > it simply moved on to the hdd, bypassing the cdrom.  SUSE LiveEval did
> > the same.  MEPIS started up OK, but then said
>
> 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.

All this talk of ancient systems!!!! My desktop machine is an AMD K5/333
with 128M and it has been given sterling service for years. Has a CD/RW
drive upgraded about a year ago.

Anne's problem certainly looks like a BIOS problem, but I'm surprized.
Most of these sorts of problems were usually on systems prior to celeron
300's, as were the duff CDROM drives that couldn't read CD-R's or CD-RW's

>
> > Looking for MEPIS Linux....
> > Can't startup filesystem
> > Halting
> >
> > Can anyone tell me what is happening?  It does seem extremely strange.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> Hope this helps,
> nsj.
>
> --
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