[RULE] My 486 won't boot.

[King_Henree@yahoo.com]

I have an Intel 486 too and did not have any problems
booting with the "slinky" floppy boot disk.  You may
have a corrupt boot disk that will need to be made
again with dd or rawrite.  If using dd, do not mount
the floppy before dd'ing it and make sure the floppy
drive light is off before removing the disk.  Check
the md5sum on the image (slinky-<version>.img) to make
sure it is not corrupt.  Check the BIOS boot order and
make sure that the floppy drive is first (BTW turn off
any shadow RAM in the BIOS).

Once you manage to get it to boot you may want to
consider allocating more disk space for linux.  My
installation uses 226MB of disk (excluding swap) which
includes the slinky (RedHat 9) base + network +
sendmail + openssh packages.  I also had to change the
RPM versions it tried to install (with slinky-0.3.96)
which you will find listed on the disk2.img disk under
/stage2_scripts/[8|9]/<package lists>.  The kernel
version to install can be changed by modifiying the
/base_install script on the disk2.img disk.

It may take a while to get your system up and running
(took me 3 days), but I can testify that it is
possible.  My main problem dealt with getting the
slinky kernel to recognize and use my NIC card
(3c509tp) which still does not work.  I just happened
to have another NIC card (3c509b) that fit this system
available.  I still need to get that other NIC working
though.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.


--- Daniel Σ Neill <danieljoneill at hotmail.com> wrote:

---------------------------------
I'm sorry if I'm rehashing a problem that has allready
been addressed, but my patience is wearing a little
thin and I'm feeling a little out of my depth.
 
I'm trying to set up a dual boot system. My 486's
(affectionatly named Bob) BIOS is too old to allow
CDROM boot. Systems details in the form of a msd
report at www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~danj/Report.txt Please
note this report is somewhat misleading (a fact I hope
to rectify soon) as it was made when I was running
Win95 and taking up alot of space.
I have since formatted the hard disk, started running
Win98, and partitioned the drive (c. 450Mb total)
leaving about 200Mb for Lunix.
 
I have availible to me RedHat 6.2 and 8.0.
 
The only sucessfull boot so far has been Tom's
root-boot. All others including Miniconda, Slinky,
Slinky-Detect, Floppix and the boot images that came
with the CD's and some from RedHat errata have failed
in the same manner. Incedetially installations of Suze
(8.1 I think) have failed in the same manner. 
         The 486 starts up, shows me a dialog box with
some rudimentary hardware and BIOS settings, then the
CDROM drive LED blinks, followed by what I assume is
the machine acessing the A-drive (incl. relevant LED
flashing and accompaning sounds), and then the screen
displays the message: boot failed. The machine then
just hangs, while I curse and tear more of my hair
out!
 
At this stage I'm looking at small Linux's like
muLinux, to see if I can use them, that and I'm
looking into using RAWRITE on the 486 instead of P3's
to see if that'll make a difference.
It seems to me that RULE should work but doesn't and
I'd rather not try to write my own boot disks! Am I
missing something here? Is there some basic step I've
overlooked?
 
I'd be gratefull for any help, even if it's just
pointing me to the relevant documentation or mail list
archive.
 
Thanks,
Daniel O'Neill
'You can put a cat in an oven but that doesn't make it
a biscuit.'



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