King_Henree's 3c509 (Was Re: [RULE] My 486 won't boot.)

[C David Rigby]

King_Henree,
	You might try to configure the 3c509 manually.  Go to 3Com's page for
the downloads for this card:

http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/result.jsp?selected=all&sort=effdt&sku=3C509&order=desc

and download the file 3c509x2.exe and make the diskette.  You will need
also a DOS or Win9x bootable floppy if the machine you are working on
does not have a DOS or Win9x OS operating system.  If it has Win9x, you
must restart the system in DOS mode in order to use the 3Com disk.

The program 3c5x9cfg.exe (I think that is the correct one) will allow
you to turn off PnP support on the NIC and set a specific IRQ and I/O
address for the card.  It is also reasonably adept at determining if
another device in the system is using a given irq or i/o address.

Once that is done, you can use a command such as

modprobe 3c509 io=0x300 irq=5

or however you set those values.  If it works, you can add the
information to your /etc/modules.conf file to be invoked at boot time.

CDRigby


On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 03:47, King_Henree at yahoo.com wrote:
> 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 Ó 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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