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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

I am still trying to make three ITBD computers load linux consistently 
with loadlin.  Are you sure lilo is not worth trying?  They work if I use 
Win95 or Win98 system instead of MS-DOS or DR-DOS.  I thought IBM PC-DOS 
also worked but today it would not boot linux and on top of that when I 
booted from a PCDOS floppy it could not find the files on C: or D:.  I did 
fdisk and the files were there.  I went back out of fdisk and it found the 
files on D: so I could try booting linux and it would not boot.

After the first five power-ons and multiple boot attempts it suddenly 
booted properly three times in a row.  Powered off, worked again, soft 
boot 'IO error'.  Then it worked again twice.

This is the one of the three that is working most consistently.  I don't 
want to have to boot from a Win9x floppy disk every time to use linux.   I 
also don't want to use Win9x DOS as the system on this computer because I 
am not running Windows on it and won't be able to defragment DOS with 
Win98 DOS defrag.

I also tried the two that usually won't boot linux.  The first one booted 
it three times in a row.  The second one beeped at us so we put in some 
RAM.  Then it played Fur Elise (Beethoven) a few times until Jim plugged 
in the 5V part of the power supply.  The DFI computers are from Taiwan.  
Lots of music school students here are Taiwanese but I did not expect this 
of the computer.  After this it booted linux properly three times.

So I have three boards that sometimes work with DR-DOS and often don't, 
but work with Win9x DOS, which leads me to think that DOS is interfering 
somehow with loading the kernel.  A different kernel image was of no help.

I will try lilo to bypass this problem.  It is supposed to give me a 
choice of DOS or linux, right?  Once I am in DOS, I would need to reboot 
the computer to get into linux, I think, just like I have to reboot it 
(check RAM, etc.) to get from linux back to DOS.  

When will the bl3 with lilo be available?  Or is it fairly simple to just 
install lilo.tgz and if not, could you explain how?  Two of these 
computers are working perfectly apart from linux (which also would not do 
plip correctly on the times when it did boot).  

I cannot imagine why this sort of problem would be intermittent.

On Sat, 8 May 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > Am I correct that lilo can also be used as a boot manager 
> > if you want a choice between booting DOS or linux?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > when I turned it on today and tried to boot into linux, told 
> > me 'not a kernel image' the first time I tried to boot but 
> > worked the second time.  I could try it with IBM-DOS but lilo 
> > might fix the problem just as well.
> 
> Don't count on lilo to fix your problem.  lilo causes more
> complications than loadlin, not less.
> 
> > Perhaps the 2.2.16 kernel has a bug that makes it intermittently 
> > unloadable with loadlin in certain operating systems on certain 
> > motherboards?
> 
> There are documented bugs in some motherboards and chips.  When 
> you compile the kernel, you are offered workarounds for those bugs
> (at the cost of space and/or speed).  Most of those workarounds 
> are *not* in the BL3 kernel.  The bare.i kernel in Slackware 7.1 
> includes most of the workarounds.
> 
> > Does it take any longer to load linux with lilo (having already 
> > booted into DOS) than with loadlin?
> 
> You can't go from DOS to lilo (although you can go from lilo to DOS).
> 
> Cheers,
> Steven
> 
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