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baslinux - Re: [BL] BasLinux Digest, Vol 66, Issue 13

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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BasLinux Digest, Vol 66, Issue 13
  • Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:18:20 +0000 (UTC)

The BIOS does detect the hard drive, and the CMOS settings has the hard
drive as the primary boot device.


I'll have to try the boot floppy and see if it boots from the hard drive. If
not, I'll search around my parts bin for another drive.

Just about any size laptop drive would work (30MB or up).

I have run into lots of hard drives that won't boot. We fixed one
recently by typing fdisk /mbr from DOS - partition table was messed up.
Others simply have wornout boot sectors.


I think the boot sector is either worn out or corrupt on both hard drives,
but this computer apparently wasn't used very often and only had one install
of Windows 95 on it, so I don't see why it would be.

I wonder if they just oxidize with age. I have had 'good' drives given to me and as soon as I partitioned, formatted, and copied files, the boot sector went bad. 9 of one batch of 10 were bad or went bad, 1-2GB.


If you have a CD_ROM drive you can try installing basiclinux to CD.
Someone posted the proper image. (Where and who?). Not all older laptops
will boot from CD-ROM but you can run Smart Boot Manager to fix that.
(One of my computers won't even work with SBM.) Some will boot from
CD-ROM but not syslinux (used by DSL). They all like LILO.


It has a CD-ROM but the BIOS no longer registers the IDE channel the CD-ROM
is on (some sort of motherboard failure), so it doesn't work. If the CD
drive did work, I'd try DSL or PuppyLinux, but I'm limited to booting from
floppy disks.

I have a pcmcia CD-ROM drive, and a parallel port zip drive. You can boot linux from a floppy disk and then chroot to use the files on one of these. Or on a USB flash drive (using a different boot disk with USB storage support).



Sindi


Joe





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