Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> I used llpro to copy all my DOS files from my main computer to another 
> computer (and from there to three others) including BL3 and BL2.
> 
> Zimage of BL2 got corrupted somehow on one of those three computers (both
> copies of zimage on this same computer were corrupted, oddly enough)  but
> a recopy worked.  It was complaining that zimage was not a real kernel.
> This was also the only one of these four computers that would not work 
> with plip - just kept timing out.  (It could be my Hercules card parallel 
> port, and I will try another.  The Hercules card worked with llpro but 
> perhaps it is not working very well with it, considering the corruption of 
> zimage 2 times out of 3).  

This may be one of those computers that are just not usable for linux.

First time I tried to boot it complained 'not an image file'.  I copied 
over my spare copy of zimage and it booted.  Next time it complained 
again, and I copied over zimage from another computer and it booted.  
(BL2).  This time I tried again to boot and got 'IO error while reading 
initrd'.  Tried again and got 'not an image file'.  Why would it work half 
the time, and when it does not work, give me different error messages?
Is it worth trying to transfer BL2 and BL3 (from a working copy) to this 
computer again?  BL2 has worked on every other computer we tried it on.

This is a computer that was given to us to recycle, and has not been used
by us before.  Another one in the batch works perfectly for DOS and all
the linuxes but not Windows (crashes a lot, and it is worse with faster
cpus).  Three others were recycled due to motherboard problems and one 
only reboots with the power switch (out of 10).

Is there some way to test whether a computer is usable in linux other than 
by trying to put BL2 or BL3 on it and run them?   Luckily we don't really 
need this computer to work as we have a few others, and it is actually 
more interesting when it does not work, but our other motherboards only go 
to 200 and the cpu is an AMD 233.


> 
> So I tried booting BL3 on both the sending and the receiving computer and 
> discovered BL3 won't boot on either of them.  (Probably because it was bad 
> on the first one and got copied from that to the second).  Or is there 
> something wrong with these computers?  The problem is that half-way 
> through boot I get to the line:
> 
> IP Protocols:  ICMP, UDP, TCP   
> 
> and it gets stuck there.  

This is a separate problem entirely.  I was able to do md5img (from BL3 on
one computer and BL2 on another) and got two completely different sums for
fs.img so will just have to copy that over again to all four computers,
this time making sure it is not corrupted.  Would it be better to use
plip?  (Wow, my answer to the last email just arrived!).


> Most likely llpro does not do a good job copying image files, either
> zimage or fs.img, and I will have to copy fs.img it over again four times
> and this time check each copy.  Maybe once I get plip working on this last 
> computer I can use that to copy fs.img, instead of llpro.
> 
> Is there some file other than fs.image that I should recopy?  This is a 
> real pain having to set up file transfer four times again so I want to get 
> it all right the first time.  
> 
> The file sizes on the good and bad zimage were the same.  Can md5sum be
> used to compare fs.img's and zimage's?  None of the temp.tgz files I
> copied with plip seem to be corrupted (the sums were the same).

Yes, md5sum works on fs.img files in a DOS partitions (BL34).


> Any other ideas on what is going wrong with the copying of BL2 (which 
> worked 3 times out of 4) and BL3 (which probably went wrong on the first 
> copy)?
> 
> Anyway, I now have three more working copies of BL2 hard disk and four of 
> BL2 ramdisk, via tar and plip.  We left the hard drives in their 
> respective computers and it only took about 50 minutes to transfer a 147MB 
> temp.tgz file (which came from about 250M of files).
> 
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