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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Hard drive booting failure
  • Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:42:02 +0000 (UTC)

I rebooted the laptop to test it, and it said," Please insert disk and press
enter."

I thought there might be something wrong with the boot sector, so I tried to
install Windows 95 without Internet Exploder (there's about 15 floppies),
and whenever it tries to scan the hard disk for errors and such after
formatting, it fails. I tried this with 2.1gb hard drive and the same thing
happened.

Have you checked CMOS settings to see if the hard drive is recognized and set to boot? Linux can find drives that the BIOS has not been told are there. A 200MHz computer may not automatically detect the hard drives.

You can download a freedos boot floppy, then test your drives by making a small DOS primary partition (use DOS fdisk and format), boot with DOS floppy, sys c:, see if it boots to hard drive. Much quicker than Windows.
Does Win95 startup disk have fdisk, format and sys?

I have run into lots of hard drives that won't boot. We fixed one recently by typing fdisk /mbr from DOS - partition table was messed up. Others simply have wornout boot sectors.

If you have a CD_ROM drive you can try installing basiclinux to CD.
Someone posted the proper image. (Where and who?). Not all older laptops will boot from CD-ROM but you can run Smart Boot Manager to fix that. (One of my computers won't even work with SBM.) Some will boot from CD-ROM but not syslinux (used by DSL). They all like LILO.

Sindi

Using loadlin with Damn Small Linux hangs after it states the processor
speed.

Is this a hardware error?

-Jeow


Please don't include so much extraneous stuff in your postings.




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