Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

We spent a few hours replacing hardware in one of three DFI computers 
(given to us to recycle) that would not boot BL2 from hard drive most of 
the time (once or twice it worked) but would boot (once, anyway) from the 
2-floppy BL2 boot disk set.  The rest of the time it would say

"not a kernel image".

We put in a known-working 200MB DOS/linux drive and were unable to boot.  
The drive booted BL2 in several other computers before and after.

Tried a different IDE cable, different controller (2 instead of 1), 
different controller card (disabled onboard controllers), different DIMM 
slot, different RAM, different battery, different cpu.  Reseated the CMOS.

DOS programs work in this computer.  The one time we got BL2 booted from 
HD to RAMdisk plip would not work (but I could have been doing something 
wrong). 

So we finally gave up and moved the AMD 233MHz cpu into another of the DFI 
computers, which I had been using yesterday.  BL2 was booting yesterday 
and I used it to transfer linux to the second drive via plip.

With the AMD cpu (and jumpers set for it) we got the 'not a kernel image'.  
Put back the Cyrix cpu, same error message.  With the drive from the AMD
computer, the drive from the Cyrix computer that had worked yesterday, and
the 200MHz test drive.  Once in a while we got IO error instead.  Tried
4x8M SIMMs instead of the 64M DIMM.  Discovered that one 64M DIMM plus 4
8M SIMMs add to 90M, and 64M plus 4x16 adds to 98M.

The third DFI computer (all with ITBD motherboards, different revisions) 
still works fine with BL2, as does the non-DFI computer that we thought 
might have a cpu speed problem at first.  These both have Intel cpus.  But 
we also tried an Intel cpu (100MHz) in the first DFI to have problems 
(AMD) and it did not help.  

I will make sure BL2 boots in any other computers before setting them up 
with cards and permanent hard drives.  But in one computer it worked 
yesterday and not today.  I used BL2 to do plip transfer to that computer.

Has anything of this sort happened to other list members?

We have three other computers to try if these prove hopeless for linux, 
but is there something else we can try before recycling the motherboards 
or consigning them to DOS only?