Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, russ loroville wrote:

> Sindi,
>    Try this on one of the computers that won't boot linux-- add this to
> the boot.bat... ide=nodma. Some of the older computers have no "direct 
> memory
> access"  (dma).
> 
> >
> > This may be one of those computers that are just not usable for linux.
> >

I put it after zimage and got 'not an image file, please specify the name 
of the image file' as usual.  This was on the first attempt to boot linux 
after booting into DOS.  Usually it tells me IO error reading initrd first 
then the second time I try to boot 'not an image file'.

I did not expect this would help since we have three motherboards all DFI 
ITBD (different revisions), 1997, one of which works and two do not (but 
one worked from floppy disk - however we did not repeat that).  Two older 
boards by DFI work with linux, so it is probably not a design problem but 
some hardware going bad.  They probably were not usable with Windows which 
is why they were given to us to recycle.  That model may have been prone 
to this problem.  The one that works is, I think, the motherboard that we 
used to replace another bad one after soldering in a replacement for the 
broken battery holder.  

We are concentrating now on finding a couple of computers that can be 
upgraded from 133Mhz to 200MHz with the 233MHz cpus from these computers.
If all else fails I will run one at 175MHz in a computer with a problem 
setting bus speeds (50 instead of 66 x 3.5).