[RULE] Re: My 486 won't boot

[C David Rigby]

Daniell,
	To isolate the problem, here are some things to try:

1)  Reset the BIOS.  Often there is an option in the BIOS menu to do
this, but I prefer to remove the backup battery and leave it out for
about 10 minutes.  This assumes that it is not soldered to the
motherboard, which is sometimes the case on older equipment.

1)  Disconnect the hard drives and cdrom drive.  It doesn't help much in
doing the installation, of course, but it might allow you to boot from
diskette in the floppy drive.  The value of this is to determine if
there is a problem with the floppy drive.  If it will boot okay without
the hard drives, then possibly one of them is a problem.  You mentioned
that the MSD report was incorrect, and that you actually have a total of
450 MB of storage available.  The MS report shows a hard drive of 380MB
and a hard drive of 20MB, which do not add up to 450.  If the system
boots with no drive except a floppy, reinstall each hard drive one at a
time, making sure to configure it as a single or master drive.

CDRigby

On Sat, 2003-08-16 at 01:51, Daniel O'Neill wrote:
> Made unallocated space into Linux partition, no affect on boot.
> Now on floppy disk no. 8 and still nothing, some of those disks had
> 'thorough' scandisks (using windows utility) preformed on them. What is
> the probability that faulty disks are the problem after using 8 disks?
> muLinux boot now added to the failed-to-boot list
> Attempted to turn off shadow RAM nearest thing I could find was for the
> VDU so I disabled it, and the machine failed to boot. I re-enabled
> it and the end result was turning my partition table to mush! So now I
> no longer have windows, more space for Linux! I now have
> one large Linux partition and an empty hard drive.
>  BTW: the machine doesn't seem to have any cards.
> 
> Daniel O'Neill
> 
> 'You can put a cat in an oven but that doesn't make it a biscuit'
> 
> 
> 
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