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[Hal MacArgle <halinux AT kvinet.com>]

Sindi asked I forward this to the list:

BL3 rescues BL2

I tried in BL2 on hard drive to use zgv, seejpeg and finally bmv on a 
computer with Trident video, having forgotten to set chipset VESA in 
libvga.config.  These are all SVGAlib programs.  None of them worked and 
bmv actually crashed things to the point where I had to power off.  
Booted back and could use seejpeg to view this time, zgv complained about 
not finding some file, and I was getting a lot of error messages about 
things not reading properly.  I rebooted and got more error messages about 
running e2fsk.  I looked in the book and was reminded that I cannot do 
this to mounted file systems so I used BL3.

First tried BL3 2-floppy, which boots lilo nicely though loadlin often 
does not work correctly unless I first boot with Win9X DOS.  (It had 
worked a few times with DR-DOS before I crashed, maybe that was related?). 
Ran e2fsck and answered yes to a few questions and it said something about 
uncorrectable errors and stopped.  Tried to figure this out online.  It is 
nice to have several linuxes on the computer.  BL2 ramdisk worked (from 
Win95 DOS boot, anyway) but does not have e2fsck.  

Then I ran it again, twice, from the DOS loop BL3 and the second time it 
was more thorough (perhaps I answered things better?).  I answered y to 
every question including those about ignoring read errors (short read) and 
it corrected lots of things and at the end seemed to be okay.  Ran it 
twice more and it said that my partition was clean so I expect it will 
work now.  I had to boot with Win95 DOS this time to be able to use BL3 
with loadlin.

How would SVGAlib have messed things up?  Or was it the power off without 
exiting properly that caused problems?

Eznet adventures (another posting)

33K internal hardware modem in Com2 (disabled in CMOS) and a friend gave 
us a working 56K sportster (upgraded in 1998 to V90, he cannot recall how) 
which we plugged into Com1.  I copied over the lines in 0 in the 
eznet.conf file and changed 0 to 1, ttyS1 to ttyS0, and, because for some 
reason this modem and its near twin garble things at 115200, changed the 
port speed to 57600.  I then typed eznet up 1 and connected.  So this is a 
way to dial with your choice of modem.  I left the 33K in there because my 
partner wants to take apart the 56K to compare it with the dead one.  (If 
it's broke, try to fix it).  

BL2 always seems to connect on the first try.  BL3 took two tries again.  
First time it removed a stale lock but would not connect.  Second time it 
connected.  I had not been using DOS, just crashing BL2 while online.  
(The problem started when I could not view the image of an electric bike 
with lynx despite having set it to work with zgv.)

End of forward: