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

> I was able to temporarily stick in an IDE drive as primary master, boot
> BL3 loop from it with regular initfs.gz, and copy BL3 and BL2 to ext2
> partitions on the scsi drive, and they boot fine with loadlin.
>
> Xvesa in ext2 appears to work (I can get into icewm) but on exit the
> screen is scrambled (blue on the bottom half) from icewm, or 20 columns
> with colors (from plain Xvesa) and the computer reboots itself.  When I
> boot loop linux Xvesa simply refuses to load, as on the Presario.  We have
> only one ATI video card which works right with Xvesa and loadlin, th
> newest one.
>
> I think this computer simply is not going to work with loop linux that
> tries to mount /dev/sda1.  If I want to do rescue I will have to put in an
> IDE drive with loop BL3 on it, or redo BL3 2-floppy version somehow to use
> my scsi kernel - how would I do this?  I don't need X or a browser for the
> rescue disk, probably just busybox.  A newer e2fsck and related library
> might be helpful to rescue BL2.  Maybe I can put together a modified
> 2-floppy BL2 set with these from the full BL2.  BL2 ramdisk needed a newer
> ext2 library to work with e2fsck from BL2 ext2.

With both IDE and SCSI drive in the computer, and the lilo boot disk in 
the floppy drive, and the computer set to boot from CD-ROM, floppy, and 
'C" (which is IDE if there are both drives), lilo booted BL3 as default 
when I put DOS first, BL3 second, BL2 last, and
delay=50
default=BL3

Xvesa appeared to work but it crashed on exit.

We removed the IDE drive and tried again in case the second drive was 
messing up Xvesa.  This time instead of booting the screen covered itself 
with diagonal rows of 01 01 01.


I rebooted and ran syschk and the computer turned itself off.  We 
discovered the plug-in wall clock had also turned itself off.

An hour later the power came back on (it is in the 90s after having 
reached 81 at 5 am and too many neighbors have air conditioning) and I got 
the same results.  With the IDE drive it boots with lilo from floppy disk, 
without the IDE drive it gives 01 01 01.  (Similarly to refusing to boot 
linux without himem.sys and emm386.exe).  Crazy computer - maybe I should 
look for the COmpaq diagnostic diskette (with opera, needs javascript).

So lilo not only does not fix Xvesa, it does not work in a scsi-only 
computer (with IDE CD-ROM drive).

When I mount the CD-ROM there are about 10 lines of complaints about not 
finding ext2 or FAT file system but I could copy xma64.tgz from SW.40 and 
when I pkg'ed it in BL3, and downloaded and pkg'ed no-xvesa.tgz, Xvesa 
worked perfectly (at 800x600x15, I think) and exited perfectly.  I only 
need to change XF86Config for higher resolution (19" monitor).

I had similar problems mounting /fd, but could mount /dev/fd0 /fd (for an 
ext2 filesystem for use with lilo - maybe Steven set it up to mount DOS).

So the answer to using Compaq (and probably Emachine) that has ATI video 
which does not behave with Xvesa is not lilo but xma64.tgz (ATI X driver) 
as suggested a while back by Steven.

I have not figured out how to make svgalib work yet.  Has anyone used zgv 
with ATI RAGE video on a computer where Xvesa won't work?  chipset VGA was 
also useless.  It needs special modelines or something.

Sindi