Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Jason Chall wrote:
> > I am running the floppy disk version of BL3
> > Everything works fine with just the floppy drive attached
> > but when I attach the Hard Disk, BL crashes on boot
> > Note, hard drive is large, 80 GB, and BIOS only sees it
> > as 8 GB.

Your 486 BIOS cannot handle anything larger.  Even older BIOS'es could 
handle only up to about 500MB.  We have several drives that manufacturers 
set up with 'EZ-DRIVE', that is somehow installed on the disk itself and 
takes over from the computer BIOS so as to recognize drives of 540MB or 1G 
or even 2.4G.  (This makes it impossible to format with DOS fdisk or 
partition with PQMagic but linux fdisk managed to ignore it).

A low-level format removed EZ-DRIVE from the 540MB before we discovered 
that linux fdisk would work around it (on the 2.5G drive we did not want 
to low-level format for 10 hours).

Our DOS diagnostic program Syschk also cannot recognize a drive larger 
than 8G.  It told us our 15G was 8G.

> BasicLinux is designed for old hardware, so it is not
> surprising that it is tripped up by something fairly
> new, like your HD.

It also won't deal with something fairly old, like 720K floppy disks 
(though I think BL1 worked with them, am I right?).

> > Also when I do boot without HD, BL does not seem to
> > recognize Solid State Disk though

What is a Solid State Disk - a memory card?
> How does the Solid State Disk connect to the system?
> IDE?  USB?  PCMCIA?  If it's IDE, BL3 should autodetect
> it (but you will need to mount it yourself).  If it's
> PCMCIA, you will need to add a module and edit the PCMCIA
> config file.  If it's USB, you are out of luck -- BL3 has
> no USB capability.

Could he use it with the SW81 USB kernel and BL3?


Vaguely related question - can I REMOVE zipslack from my DOS partition 
(UMSDOS, file names ending int .{__ or .{_8) while in DOS, when it keeps 
telling me that the file names are too long?  Linux has too many levels of 
subpartition for xdel /a /e /s to handle, apparently.  I presume linux 
could remove it better.  While removing the rest of it I noticed many 
many screenfuls of /dev going by.  I am grateful that you left out most of 
the more obscure /dev's from BL (though 720K did need to be added by me).

Are there any other devices that other users think should be added to BL3? 
Christof added the sound devices in his package.

 > Cheers,
> Steven
>
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org