Baslinux mailing list

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

We got a Hitachi 133MHz laptop mechanically working.  It has 16MB RAM, and 
Redhat 7.0, a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive.  It came with hda1 = OS/2 
hidden partition (40MB) , hda2 = linux ext2 (Redhat) (1.2GB) and hda3/5 
extended/swap (128MB, probably some default based on an expected 64MB 
RAM).  USB port, serial and parallel ports.

We have cameras that use all three of these and can also use the PCMCIA 
slot (with CF adaptor) for file transfers.  We have a serial camera 
(Olympus) and a USB SM card, and a USB camera (HP) that works in DOS and 
has the CF adaptor for the CF card and a DOS parallel port reader.

I have DOS and linux photopc (serial) and DOS USB drivers and BL pcmcia CF 
adaptor setup.

I got Redhat to run in runlevel 2 instead of 5, and removed a lot of 
things from /etc/rc.d/init.d so they would not use up all the RAM.

I made a 32MB swap file, which got a little use while in runlevel 5 before 
getting rid of all the running processes (sendmail, xfs, xterm, etc.).  I 
now have about 11MB free RAM (despite four vts and gpm running).

Cardmgr can't find the known good ethernet card so I hope to use a 
parallel transfer cable to put on:
1)  40MB of DOS with BL3 loop and a working cardmgr setup (I hope).
2)  128MB of ext2 with BL2 or BL3 (with netpbm and zgv for photo editing).

Without a DOS boot floppy disk, how can I format the 40MB FAT16 partition 
that I made with Redhat fdisk and put system files on it?

There is one partition type in Redhat fdisk called Partition Magic - can 
this somehow be used to format FAT16?

I have no idea how to make a bootable DOS CD and neither of our 
CD-burners is currently cooperating - one does not like the recent 
package of blanks, and the other keeps making bad copies.

A floppy drive for this computer would cost more than the computer is 
worth.

Can linux format a DOS FAT16 partition somehow?  Are the system files just 
hidden files that I can copy via linux?


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