4 Jan
1998
4 Jan
'98
4:08 p.m.
<6. Be prepared to turn off caches...internal and
external in the BIOS.
<Sometimes, especially on newer kernels like Slackware 3.0, you can't ge
<the boot floppy to go because it'll crash out and give you stack dump
<type information. Try turning off first the external cache and then th
<internal cache if that doesn't work. Not all caches are created equal
I'm not getting stackdumps. I'm getting all mannor of boot errors
related to the filesystem mountability or RW/RO status.
Not a problem I get fully through the setup.
Ok, at some point it wants to do a LILO install...LILO is the boot
loader. Where are you having it put the boot loader? Even though it's a
pain if you ever want to reformat the drive for MS-DOS, I usually put the
boot loader in the MBR (Master Boot Record).
But this would cause it not to boot at all...not to fail when it tries to
moutn the drive. What it will do is see the drive as a piece of
hardware, then it will mount it read only and do an fsck (file system
check), then it will mount it read write.
You'll see the following messages or something like them interspersed
with other messages:
date something kernel: hda: Manufacturer, Size & Cache,
CHS=cyl/heads/sectors, MaxMult=something
then
date something kernel: partition check:
date something kernel: hda: hda1 hda2
date something kernel: VFS: mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
date something kernel: Adding Swap: 16000K swap-space (maybe a diff number)
and then some other messages talking about fsck etc etc...
and then it'll finally mount it read-write...
Can you tell me exactly what the error messages are? I know it's a pain
because it scrolls by kinda quick but I need to know exactly what it's
saying to give you a good idea what's going on and why.
One thing I could do...I'd have to clean some personal stuff off it...is
send you a little 40 meg drive that has Slackware 2.0 on it that I really
don't use much anymore. If it'll boot that then it's not your
hardware...it's either the formatting of the hard drive or the drive
itself. Sometimes just because they'll do MS-DOS ok doesn't mean they'll
do linux ok. It's rare but it happens.
Send me a private email if you want to do this. I've left this public
because I thought it might be of use to others.
Yeah yeah I know it's linux not cp/m blah blah blah. Except that one of
the coolest things to do with Linux is to run emulators for other
machines. I've got a whole bunch on my website at
http://www.retrocomputing.com/software.html. And I'm working on getting
Douglas Jones' PDP-8 emulator to work so that'll work on Linux soon too.
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead