Baslinux mailing list

[Jonathan Stuart Lovelace <kingjon AT cyberspace.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?

(I replied offlist, but another idea has occurred to me. Redhat, at least, has
mtools, which includes mformat. That program makes a DOS partition; I don't
know if it can put the system files on.)

> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux



-- 
kingjon AT cyberspace.org
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