Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sun, 9 May 2004, Matrix Mole wrote:

> On Sat, 8 May 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Actually, you can still defrag the machine even if you're using win98 DOS
> as opposed to dos6 Dos. You just ahve to boot with the older dos boot disk
> (I'm assuming that it'd be a win98 without the windows/program files

We thought about defragmenting by rebooting with another DOS disk and
decided it would be easier just to keep zimage on a Win98 floppy disk,
from which it WILL boot linux on occasions when it cannot be booted from
hard drive.

> directories). It sounds as though there's something seriously wrong with
> the ssytems though. Have you looked at the possiblity of changeing BIOS
> settings to disable PnP OS? I've never heard of problems like you're
> reporting, but if it only works when using a PnP OS, and has serious
> errors when non-PnP is used, then that may be the problem in a nutshell.

We also experimented with 'fail-safe' BIOS settings, which are to disable 
pnp BIOS (we do that all the time anyway).  It often works when using DR 
or MS DOS, but not always.  Last night, on one computer, it refused to 
work 5 times, worked 3, refused for about 2, worked again.

> 
> > 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.
> 
> lilo is a boot manager similar to the manager offered by winnt and
> partition magic (and others). It sits on the MBR of your primary HD. When
> you turn on your computer or restart is (using Ctrl-Alt-Del, or any other
> method that gives BIOS version information), it loads data from the MBR
> before anything else is done about OS's. Then the boot manager takes over.
> In the case of lilo, it really doesn't provide a menu like choice, just a
> command that you can type the "name" (as specified in lilo configuration
> when you setup it up to begin with) for what OS it should load. Once it
> knows what OS to give control of the computer over to, that OS is
> completely in control, and the other OS's that may be installed aren't
> available (unless, such as linux mount ability, you have some way of
> access the data on that partition type, like Windows allowing you to see
> Dos drives, or WinNt allowing access to Win98 drives, etc). So to go from
> one OS to the other, you will have to reboot the computer (either
> Ctrl-Alt-Del, or cycle the power off and on).

That means it would take a bit longer to go from DOS to linux since I
would need to reboot the computer, and also a bit longer to boot into DOS
in the first place, I think.  Lilo sounds best for people who don't want
to use DOS at all.  I might try this just as an experiment but since I use
DOS a lot it does not seem like a good solution.

> 
> > 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've heard that lilo is very confusion to setup and ahve operate properly
> on a computer. The only times I've ever set it up myself were when I
> installed larger distros of linux that have nice GUI installers (and who
> invariably dumped twice as much stuff on the HD as I would ever actualyl
> want to use). In those cases, the installers were pre-configured for
> detecting settings, so I never had much of a problem getting lilo to work,
> but for installing lilo from lilo.tgz, I've never tried it, so I don't
> know how easy it'd be to setup. I would assume that there is a lilo HOWTO
> somewhere in tldp.org that you could peruse.

My SW32 book describes how to do it but not very clearly.

> > I cannot imagine why this sort of problem would be intermittent.
> 
> Again, it may have something to do with PnP BIOS settings needing to be
> turned off. Other than that, I have no clue as to why the problem exists
> at all.

I have heard a lot of theories and so far the one about DRDOS and WIN9x 
DOS making different types of file structures sounds most likely.
The same person suggested a weak battery, failing hard drive (we checked 
these all).  

I had better finish the network card experiment in our two linux test 
computers before fiddling with the MBR.
> 
>