Baslinux mailing list

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

After the ASUS, to which I transferred the innards of the Gateway which 
had been working with loadlin and then suddenly stopped booting with it 
(even with Win98 DOS) with a 'not an image file' problem suddenly stopped 
having that problem, we gave the Gateway another chance and it booted with 
loadlin three times in a row (after we fed it a hard drive without 
FreeDOS, which makes it unable to find the drive).  So we decided to 
install a standard linux to it on the 850MB drive since it is our second 
fastest computer and standard linuxes are big and slow.

Two hours later we had learned how Mandrake 9.2 installs itself.  Wait 10 
sec between screens (graphical), tell it you want to choose individual 
files, and it loads them all anyway.  It choked on mkinitrd, then would 
not install lilo, then had some video setup problem, then crashed. 
Perhaps it needs a faster computer in order to install correctly.  Now 
my partner understands why we should be using Slackware.  (He declined to 
try an old Debian first, and has already given up on Caldera and Redhat 
and looked at SuSE before).

Mandrake got the USB mouse working immediately, which is about all it got 
working.  We chose USB and did not need to choose optical or Logitech.

Since he has a USB optical mouse (given to us dead, worked after he 
removed a lot of sticky liquid from its bowels and dried it out) he 
decided to just put on a regular SW81 installation which has USB support 
in usb.i. It very kindly guided us through the process (letting us do our 
own formatting if we preferred) and we could choose whether to not install 
even recommended files (such as vim).  Without a desktop or office we 
ended up with about 500MB (including lots of compiler files, perl, all the 
possible shells, X.....).  We chose NOT to install lilo since it said that 
could cause problems, and we made a syslinux boot disk.

Then I removed the CD-ROM and rebooted to DOS and went to BL2 and typed 
'boot' so that I could set up to use loadlin with SW81 and the usb.i 
kernel.  From BL2 we got 'Not a kernel image'.  Three times in a row. 
This computer has gone from always good for loadlin (except using loop 
linux for some reason) to useless one day, to usable three times a few 
days later, to unusable an hour after that.  Definitely intermittent and 
this problem is not cured by Win98 DOS unlike the other four.  We need 
some other way to boot.

The CD-ROMs booted somehow - with lilo?   The computer can boot from 
CD-ROM.

We already chose not to let the setup program install lilo to the boot 
record on hda (the binary is on /hdb1), and cannot install lilo from BL2 
ramdisk in /hda2 because loadlin will not work on that computer at the 
moment.

This leaves the 2-floppy BL3 to install lilo from, if necessary.
Or can we run the CD again and install lilo without doing the other steps?

Presumably syslinux is another way to boot and we will try to access SW81 
with it (and if that works we could also install lilo at that time).  Can 
you use syslinux to boot from DOS, like loadlin?

What exactly can lilo do to damage the partition?  Is this software or 
hardware damage?  It is one of our larger nicer drives.

I know this is not exactly basliclinux but the computer will probably end 
up with basiclinux eventually if it can be made to boot linux, and 
syslinux might be handy for other people when loadlin does not work.  Hal 
has two such computers and I now have four.  Everything else seems to work 
on them (except that the Gateway does not like FreeDOS, but neither does 
another Gateway which runs loadlin just fine).

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