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Sindi Keesan wrote:
>
> Usually it all goes well until I put in disk 2 and 
> hit space bar and get Divide overflow.    

So everything is correctly assembled in the ramdisk (c:):
loadlin.exe, zimage and baslinux.gz?  And all of them
have the same length as usual?  

> One time while copying zimage from a: to c> (ramdisk) 
> I got a string of gibberish with hearts and happy faces 
> and the computer froze up and had to be powered off and 
> on again.  

So the computer froze up on a simple copy command?
It would appear that the ramdisk is using RAM that 
is already in use.  vdisk is an old ramdisk maker 
(from DOS 3.3) -- perhaps it is being tripped up 
by the RAM allocation method used in that computer.
Does it, by any chance, share its RAM with the video 
card?  Or do anything else funny with its RAM?  Or
have any unusual RAM settings in the BIOS?

You might try using a different ramdisk maker (that
might necessitate SYSing the floppy with a more recent 
version of DOS).  Keep in mind that if you use a different
DOS, the ramdisk will probably not come up as C:.

> It appears that zimage is not being copied correctly to 
> drive C> (ramdisk) from drive A: (floppy disk).  

What size is zimage after the copy?  If it is the correct
size, try copying it back to a different floppy and see
if that will boot from HD (with the normal boot).

> This computer has EDO RAM - 4x8M SIMMs.  The Intel has 
> 4x16M FP SIMMs. The AMD has 2 DIMMs.  I doubt that they 
> all have bad RAM.  

It's worth doing a RAM check.  As you know, DOS works
quite happily with bad RAM.  Linux does not.  If you 
don't have a proper RAM checker, have a google for
memtest.  It creates an auto-booting floppy that very
thoroughly checks all RAM.

> 4DOS also had some trouble accessing the ramdrive.  

So those computers are 4DOS incompatible?  Sounds like
you've got some fussy hardware there.

Cheers,
Steven