Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

> The BIOS does detect the hard drive, and the CMOS settings has the hard
> drive as the primary boot device.

> I'll have to try the boot floppy and see if it boots from the hard drive. If
> not, I'll search around my parts bin for another drive.

Just about any size laptop drive would work (30MB or up).

> > 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.
>
>
> I think the boot sector is either worn out or corrupt on both hard drives,
> but this computer apparently wasn't used very often and only had one install
> of Windows 95 on it, so I don't see why it would be.

I wonder if they just oxidize with age.  I have had 'good' drives given to 
me and as soon as I partitioned, formatted, and copied files, the boot 
sector went bad.  9 of one batch of 10 were bad or went bad, 1-2GB.

> 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.
>
> It has a CD-ROM but the BIOS no longer registers the IDE channel the CD-ROM
> is on (some sort of motherboard failure), so it doesn't work. If the CD
> drive did work, I'd try DSL or PuppyLinux, but I'm limited to booting from
> floppy disks.

I have a pcmcia CD-ROM drive, and a parallel port zip drive.  You can boot 
linux from a floppy disk and then chroot to use the files on one of these. 
Or on a USB flash drive (using a different boot disk with USB storage 
support).



> Sindi
> >
>
> Joe