On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 21:19 +1000, elliott-brennan wrote: > I'm trying to install DSL. I've changed the IDE cables around and the > settings in BIOS and the CD-ROM and the HDD itself; trying them out as > Master and 'apprentice' in various orders and with each on as IDE 1 or > 2. The best I've got to is "disk boot failure", when it's started up the > disk in the drive and then... pause... ""disk boot failure" :( > > Dunno what's going on. > > I've tried other disks that I know work (Puppy Linux - even Slackware) > and no joy. Hi Patrick,
I'd be inclined to set the HDD as master on the first IDE bus and the CDROM as master on the second IDE bus (i.e. using a separate ribbon cable for each) Next try to boot from a one floppy linux distro such as tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/rb If that works OK then download the bootfloppy.img (1.4MB) from one of the dsl mirrors using another computer. Copy it to a known good floppy like so dd if=bootfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k conv=sync ;sync Set the BIOS of the P120 to boot first from the floppy drive and secondly from the HDD. With the dsl CD in the CDROM and your new boot floppy in the floppy drive see if the computer will boot. BTW there are two versions of the dsl CD. These are dsl-1.4.iso and dsl-1.4-syslinux.iso the latter is the one more likely to boot using an old computer. If you do succeed in getting it to boot then you may be able to do a "frugal" install to the HDD. You will need to create three partitions on the hard drive. One swap partition, one ~55MB partition to hold the compressed image and one partition to hold /home, /opt and backup & restore. (I haven't tried this yet my self so I can't go into detail) cheers, Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
