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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I have two computers, a DFI and an ASUS P5A-B (both PI socket7, Intel and 
AMD-K6-2).  I have been using the DFI for DOS and linux.  It is one of 
three DFIs that have had trouble booting linux (Ramdisk, loop, umsdos, or 
ext2) with loadlin.  They boot about 3/4 of the time with DRDOS or MSDOS, 
and all the time with Win9X DOS, except for zipslack (UMSDOS) from SW4.0, 
which NEVER booted into linux.  I would get 'not a kernel image'.  Lilo 
boot works every time.

I have a master and a slave drive.

Having tired of this frequent boot problem (which required powering off 
the computer to fix it when it occurred) and not wanting to put Win98 DOS 
on the computer, I moved all the cards and the hard drives to the ASUS.

The ASUS booted zipslack perfectly on the first try, also BL2 RAMdisk, BL3 
loop, and BL3 floppy lilo boot.  But when I tried to boot to an ext2 
partition with BL2 or BL3, it would get stuck at the line:
IP Protocols:  ICMP, UDP, TCP (or sooner with bare.i kernel, at NET4.0).

I am able to boot the RAMdisk BL2 and then mount /dev/hdb2 on /hd and then
chroot /hd /bin/bash -login and run my startup scripts (rc.*) and if i 
wanted I could add the fourth terminal to RAMdisk linux, but this is also 
a nuisance since I think I have to chroot for each terminal, and too many 
processes continue running and it is confusing, tho not impossible.

So when Hal said he had the fix for the 'not a kernel image' problem I 
decided to try it.  He said to rdev zimage /dev/hdb2 or whatever I was 
using for the root device (/dev/ram0 /dev/loop, etc) instead of the 
current /dev/hdc1 - which he says is where zimage was compiled originally 
by Steven.  rdev zimage (first cd to its location) tells you Root device 
/dev/hdc1 but rdev zimage /dev/hdb2 changes it so next time ou do rdev 
zimage you get Root device /dev/hdb2.  I was hoping this would fix my boot 
problem as it seems to have fixed his.  His only booted properly 1/6 of 
the time except with Win98 DOS (or lilo).

Before doing this, I put in a 42MB hard drive that was sitting around into 
the DFI to confirm that it still had the problem.  It was formatted with 
FreeDOS so the C: drive is hda4, as I eventually figured out.  I 
transferred BL2 RAMdisk to that drive and tested to make sure I still had 
the original boot problems part of the time.

After 10 sucessful boots I decided to do something more predictable and 
put the original hard drive (with zipslack) back in to see if it would 
work with FreeDOS Hal said FreeDOS did not help him but we have different 
boards.

So I was back to my original setup (minus the cards - I had put in a stray 
ISA video card but no other cards; but with all the original drives, RAM, 
and cpu) and decided before testing with FreeDOS to confirm my original 
problem using DR-DOS to boot linux from, the problem being that all the 
linuxes used to boot about 3/4 of the time except zipslack would always 
get stuck.  I had not been able to test zipslack on the 42MB drive (too 
small a drive to install zipslack to).

Now, from DR-DOS, zipslack booted perfectly (perfectly slowly, too) twice! 
???  BL2 RAMdisk booted perfectly.  BL3 loop booted perfectly.  The last 
two often boot perfectly but the first never did before.  My software was 
identical - DRDOS, original hard drives.  So then I figured I would do a 
complete test and tried booting BL2 to ext2 - it crashed just like in the 
ASUS computer.  BL3 to ext2 did the same.

The cards are unlikely to be the problem as I left them behind in the 
ASUS.  The memory ditto   Only thing in common is the hard drives and 
the keyboard and monitor.  Could the keyboard interfere with booting?

My original problem has now fixed itself somehow, but the new problem has 
followed the hard drive back to this computer.  HOW?????

What might the ASUS motherboard have done to the hard drive to make it 
start to work with loadlin, booting zipslack which never booted before, 
and to always boot RAMdisk and loop linux? And to stop it from ever 
booting to a linux ext2 partition?

Now I have two computers with the same problem.  Can a motherboard give a 
hard drive a virus?  What on earth is going on?  Should I fdisk /mbr?

Any suggestions, other than installing bl2 or bl3 to ext2 on another 
drive, and putting on zipslack in a DOS partition, and trying that drive 
on both computers?  I can also try the original drives on a third 
motherboard.



keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org