[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> How much RAM is on that old i386DX? At a guess, not enough to run a
> normal install of a modern distro. I am sorry, I don't know how much
> that is. 4m is almost certainly too little. 8m is _probably_ not
> enough. The RH 5.2 install floppy found the HD, so I doubt that's
> really the problem. Modern installs are designed to go easily onto
> modern hardware, at the possible cost of becoming confused by old
> hardware.
>
> I swear by the Slackware text install (never used any other) for older
> hardware. At the top of Slackware should be a file LOWMEM.TXT. If
> you'll read and be guided by that you should be able to install
> Slackware without much trouble. I've installed Slackware 3.4 on a 386
> laptop with 4mb, so I know it can be done. I didn't use a ramdisk.
I have 8M of RAM.
I tried today with RedHat 5.1. The memory limit is 4M.
I made a boot floppy and supp floppy.
Everything worked fine with the boot floppy. After vmlinuz decompresed
it was a message somewhere "hda: Seagate3630a,601M"
I was asked where is the distribution and I answered on hard-disk.
Then I was asked to put the supp floppy in drive a: and so I did.
Then I was asked what I want to use,Diskdruid or fdisk. I answered
Diskdruid and the message was:
" No drives found
An error has ocured-no valid devices were found
on which to create newfilesystems.Please check
your hardware for the cause of this problem."
The problem is the first time I tried with the Debian floppies it worked
and so I could do the partitions.
After a few weeks when I really wanted to install it didn't worked
neither with the same Debian. And the Slackware I tried was the 3.5, I
used before RedHat.I tried only with old distributions.
Now I have another HDD as slave, an older Seagate ST3630A of 240M.
Linux is seeing it and wants to install on hdb, but no way to see hda.
And another clue: If I enable in BIOS setup "IDE HDD Block mode" the
computer does not see anymore the slave.
Could it be a controller problem? The HDD controler is the old style, on
an ISA card (16 bit).
I can put the linux on hdb but it is small and I loose 100M on hda
because MSDOS see only 500M of the 600M. The partitions now are
hda1/msdos 300M , hda2/ext2 300M, hda3/swap. How can I do to make MSDOS
to see all the disk and to turn the Linux partitions in DOS partitions
without looseing data from hda1?
Thanks
Cristian
