Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

The continuing saga of the DFI ITBD rev B 1997 motherboard that won't load 
zimage (IO problem reading INITRD, try again 'not a kernel image' when you 
try to boot linux) unless the hard drive is using Win98 DOS, or you boot 
from a 2-floppy BL2 set formatted wtih Win98 DOS, or load zimage from the 
latter but boot from the hard drive.

Today, after working for a while, the computer suddenly beeped and would 
not boot when turned on.  With the S3 PCI video card removed it does not 
beep (and probably does not boot).  With Alliance or Trident PCI, it does 
not beep, and does not boot.  We tried a different PCI slot.

We replaced the sound card (there are never enough ISA slots) with an ISA
Trident video card and it boots. That card won't work with Univesa TSR
driver (which makes many older non-VESA cards into VESA-1.2 compliant) so
is not good for DOS.

The Orchid (S3)  ISA card is native VESA 1.2 but won't display correctly
in linux (gives colored lines).  It also won't work with Jim's little DOS 
text editor, but it works nicely otherwise in DOS (to 1M colors) and Win.

The following cards won't work with UNIVESA.  I don't know if they will 
work with the svgalib VESA driver or XVESA and don't care at this point 
since we also need the card working in DOS.

NCR 77C22 2M RAM (no Compushow driver)
WDC  WD90C31A-LR (works fine with Compushow and its own drivers)
One Trident TVGA8900CL-B '92
Most OAK cards need their own OTIVBE VESA driver

The following won't work with Linux (but will work with UNIVESA)

Another Trident TVGA8900CL  '92
One Tseng ET4000 with 100 ms RAM

The following work with UNIVESA and LINUX (in theory) to 256 colors
Another Tseng ET4000 with 80 ms RAM
Oak OTI067 512K RAM - works with UNIVESA not the OAK OTIVBE VESA driver

We put in the fast Tseng and hope it will do SVGAlib in VESA mode and
XVESA - at least it displays linux text properly and DOS graphics in VESA
mode.  I like Tseng - does 100 and 132 columns in both DOS and linux text 
modes.  

The older cards we have had the best luck with for both DOS VESA and linux
are VLB video cards, but they don't make pentiums with those slots.

Our next stumbling block was the Seagate 540M hard drive that was doing
file transfer at 190 [K/sec?] instead of the expected 5000, when checked
with syschk, which explains why it went really slow in this computer when
we tried to partition.  The the 34O MB Seagate tests out at 6700 but would
not work in that computer with Partition Magic (it got stuck).  We
partitioned in another computer and expect this computer to finish dying
soon.

Maybe not booting linux is an early sign of other problems to come.  
Has anyone else noticed this?

I am about to transfer the zipped version of fs.img with laplink pro to 
see if it fares better than the unzipped version (which changed its md5sum 
value every time it was transferred).