Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Rob Heard wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> 
> > Syschk finds the drive but says it is not formatted.
> > Fdisk says there are no partitions.  We partition with PQMagic before
> > that.  Repartitioned with fdisk. (Tried MS-DOS 6.22, DR-DOS, Win95 and
> > Win98 DOS).  Seems to work at first but then displays file names wrong.
> > Command.com becomes commaod!.! or the like (consistently).  Can't find
> > directories or renames them oddly.
> >
> 
> I once had a machine that did the same sort of thing.  The nice tech
> person at work said the hard disk controller was defective.
> 
> Cheers,  Rob

I am online (telnetted, also used links) from a bootable Damn Small Linux 
that James sent me, after installing Smart Bootmanager. 

Download the DOS executable sbminstall.exe, have cwsdpmi in the same 
directory (or on the path probably), type:
sbminstall -t us -d 0    For English and install to floppy (0).

About 2 seconds later it is on the floppy drive.
Insert floppy drive into computer, turn on computer, in a couple of 
seconds it asks whether to boot from floppy, either of two hard drives, or 
CD-ROM drive.  I arrowed down to CD-ROM drive and hit Enter and it booted
linux from CD-ROM.

DamnSmallLinux analyzed the hardware and told me that the CD-ROM drive is 
scd0.  I think this means it is a SCSI drive, which might be why the hard 
drive controller can be bad but the CD-ROM drive still works.

It also told me cardmgr was ttyS2.  I was able to learn enough vi to edit 
the wvdial.conf file to set modem to ttyS2 (it dialed) and also to ttyS0 
(dialed with a external modem as well).  Also had to set userid and 
password in two places, and phone number but not DNS servers.
Too bad I have to re-edit all this stuff every time I boot, but I suppose 
I could copy the file to floppy disk as with BL ramdisk.


Video is Vesa 2.0 so works with Xfbdev (which the CD says is better for 
'old computers' - it does not know this is one of our newest computers).

Wow, now I can tell everyone how to make their computer boot from CD-ROM!
And I know this computer works.  I could plug the phone line into either a
pull-out PCMCIA phone jack, or into a little gadget that came with another
laptop computer (486), that plugged into the thing next to it and had a
place to plug in the phone and four red LEDs.  What are these called?  I
have nearly zero experience with PCMCIA.

Anyway, BL3 ought to also work fine on this computer with the PCMCIA modem 
from two floppy disks, and some day maybe I can learn to make my own 
bootable CD containing BL2 configured for this computer.  Xfbdev even.
And the phone thing from the 486 works so I can put Bl3 on hard drive 
there and go online.


I cannot imagine how long it would take to get Windows to go online with 
either of these computers.  The 486 came with a lot of PCMCIA software 
which we never figured out.  

Thanks again to everyone for the info.

Sindi