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Sindi Keesan wrote

> Hello, Steven, hello Sindi,
>  
> Thanks for your help, I read all your suggestions and that helped me to get a 
> little deeper in the problem.
> Yes, I used to have an old XT on my desk, and now I have a PENTIUM 133 mother
> Gigabyte GA586S Rev1.22C Mainboard Socket-7 & Pentium 133, 
> 3xISA, 5xPCI, 4xRAM-Sockel 72Pin, 3xIDE Socket. I have 16 Mb RAM installed, 
> and the ST238. It is very old, but I had it on my XT and, as I don´t plan to 
> use it again, I thought It would be usefull for beginning with linux. Here in 
> Argentina an old IDE drive is almost so expensive as a new 80 Gb unit, about 
> 50 dollars, so perhaps I buy a new one for my Pentium3 in the future and use 
> for Linux the 40Gb unit I run now. I don´t know anyway how much would the 
> P133 recognize from it...
>
> I did all as suggested with the bzimage from slackware 7.1, in xt.i folder, 
> and modified BOOT.bat. It runned a bit further and recognizes the ST238, but 
> it halts when INITFS tries to execute what follows:
>
> mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /DOS  2>/dev/null
> test -e /DOS/baslin/fs.img && break
> umount /DOS  2>/dev/null
> echo '/baslin/fs.img not found on /dev/hda1'

> I see that now Linux detects my Seagate, and it recognizes it as "xda" 
> or "xda1". I am an absolute beginner to linux, but I worked woth some 
> programming during Electronic Engineering, and I suppose it would stay 
> something like "xda1" instead of "hda, hdb, hdc...". But I don´t know 
> how it should mount the blocks of RAMDISK, so I didn't modified INITFS 
> yet.

The RAMdisk involves memory, not the hard drive.  I think you only need to 
add a section for xda1 to linuxrc.

I modified linuxrc in initfs.gz and posted initfs2.gz, which instead of 
looking just for partitions on IDE drives, also looks for xda1 (the first 
partition on your drive) and for sda1 (first partition on scsi hard drive) 
and sda4 (scsi or parport zip drive).

Rename initfs.gz to something else such as initfs1.gz, and then rename 
initfs2.gz to initfs.gz (or else edit the boot.bat file to point to 
initfs2.gz instead of initfs.gz).

http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/initfs2.gz
About 44 K.

I have not tested this.  Let us know if it works.
(A few years ago I was unable to boot BL3 DOS/loop version from scsi drive 
this way, but it was a really strange computer).

I have run BL3 from zip drives by using a special boot floppy disk created 
by David Moberg, a list member.

I have also run BL3 from my camera memory card by first booting with 
another of David's floppy disks that supports USB storage, then switching 
(chrooting) to a file system on the camera memory card.  Your camera must 
be USB storage.  Or you can boot from floppy disk and then run BL3 from 
any USB storage device such as pen drive.  If your computer can boot from 
pen drive, you can probably boot to BL3 directly on the pen drive.

Can't you find a used 200MB IDE drive?  People here are now throwing away 
10GB IDE drives.

Sindi

>

> Cheers,
>
> Carlos