I have an old PC which is proving remarkably stubborn. It boots with Knoppix but any distro that actually requires access to the HD either hangs at some point in the installation process (Mandrake) or produces an installation that won't boot (Slackware). I've tried Slackware 10, Mandrake 10.0 and Mandrake 8.2.
Win 98, incidently went on perfectly and has been no more troublesome than usual. There were no problems partitioning the disk or setting up LILO BTW.
A friend spent a Sunday afternoon alternately playing with it and swearing at it. He has concluded that there is a very fundimnental problem with the IDE controller. The machine is an AMD K6, with a Gigabyte GA 5AA mb which has an ALI M5229 IDE controller.
Can anybody offer any insights inbto what's going on and how it may be cured?
On Thursday 07 October 2004 2:09 pm, mtm@cmp.uea.ac.uk wrote:
Can anybody offer any insights inbto what's going on and how it may be cured?
That Controller is a UDMA/100 so make sure that you are using the proper 80 conductor cables rather than the 40 conductor ones as found in old PC's (you can tell the 80 conductor ones apart as they generally have much finer ribs on the ribbon)
If you are running a single drive then it should be at the last connector on the cable, do not have it on the middle connector with the end of the cable left disconnected.
If some bright spark has cut down the cables to make the case nice and smart then discard them (they won't work very well)
Double check master/slave jumpers and possibly avoid cable select (although nearly all 80 conductor cables support this)
In the non booting scenario, what happens exactly ?
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mtm＠cmp.uea.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood