On 12-Oct-05 Anthony Anson wrote:
Before you pass on to the next item, the Linux issue appears shortly...
I've just put a box together (AMD 900, nine hundred and mumble mumble MB RAM).
IDE Channel 1: HD0 (master) and CD/DVD-RW (slave), cable detect IDE Channel 2: HD1 and Zip100 - both slave - not cable-detect. UW SCSI card and 2 × UW SCSI HDs ATI Rage 128 AGP card Internal hardware modem, PCI (can't unforget which one)
[...]
Tony, that looks like serious hardware problems to me. Difficult to suggest where to start -- was going to suggest putting a different drive in as HD0 and seeing where you got to, but you've tried playing with that sort of thing it seems.
One thing that you may find very useful in diagnosis, however, is "Linux on a Floppy", aka "tomsrtbt". Find it at
donwload the tarball, and follow the instructions in the FAQ. You end up with a single floppy which will plant a very capable mini-Linux in RAM, from which you can explore your system (including playing with the hard drives using fdisk, though I'd leave actially altering anything on the drives until you are pretty clear as to what's going on).
Note that you'll need a floppy drive capable of formatting the floppy as 1.722MB (/dev/fd0u1722); recent floppy drives should handle this fine.
The just boot off the floppy, and follow the on-screen instructions. It's all very simple. Since it resides entirley in RAM, you don't need to touch the hard drive if you only want to look at it.
This Linux also includes a good variety of drivers for hardware, as well as an impressive array of system tools.
If you can't get it properly booted off the floppy, then you have a problem with the floppy/RAM/motherboard/video; maybe conflict with other devices (you've got an interesting bunch of kit in there).
Highly recommended as a last resort -- I now always have one by me, including in a pocket of my laptop, just in case!
Good luck, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 12-Oct-05 Time: 23:05:07 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------