Help installing on really old HW

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Help installing on really old HW
started by: lhralt

Posted by lhralt on Dec. 15 2007,04:53

I have an original Gateway 486 Micronics MB with a 340 Meg IDE drive, Mach 32 video card, a Ultrastor 34-f VESA SCSI card, a SCSI zip drive, and a 1 gig 1080S SCSI Empire Quantum drive. Also have 64 Meg of RAM, and a SCSI NEC 84 CD-ROM drive

I have DOS / WIN 3.1 on the IDE drive.

I can get DSL 4 to boot up - but only after I copied the knoppix files onto the C: DOS/WIN partition.

I mod'ed the boot floppy to include the 34-f driver, so that DSL could recognize the zip/cdr/Scsi hard drive. I installed DSL onto the SCSI drive.

Problem #1 - I can't get DSL to boot from the SCSI installation directly. I was able to mod a floppy to include the 34-f driver (because the motherboard bios doesn't support cdr boot), but then it can't find the scsi drive DSL installation.

Do I need to install some kind of boot-strap linux onto the IDE drive that boot straps me into the full installation onto the scsi drive?

Prob #2 - DSL boot floppy w/34-f driver recognizes the NEC 34 CDR but can't boot from the syslinux CD. It just spins the CD. Do I need to add another driver to the floppy?

I have spent alot of time on this - searching through FAQ's, etc. I know someone must have solved #1, and maybe #2. Can you help? I'm pretty computer savvy but haven't (sadly) had as much time as many of you to become zen-ful on DSL.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Posted by curaga on Dec. 15 2007,11:37

#1 - can your computer boot directly from the scsi disk? If not, you would need to copy the kernel and bootloader files to the ide disk, and install a bootloader to it. And create a new initrd, that has your scsi driver, and loads it, but does nothing else..

Posted by lhralt on Dec. 15 2007,20:42

Quote (curaga @ Dec. 15 2007,06:37)

I'm OK using the IDE drive with a bootloader to dual boot. So your thought process below sounds like what I'd want to do.

Is there a resource that can give me some tips on (A) What I need to copy over (which kernel and bootloader files) (b) recommendations on which bootloader to use © tips on what to do to initrd in addition to getting a new 34-f driver in there to make it bootstrap a DSL installation?

Posted by curaga on Dec. 15 2007,21:28

files to copy: linux24, minirt24.gz from the cd's /boot/isolinux, and /boot/grub/menu.lst from the installed version. All to /boot of the ide drive, fat32 is fine for fs.
recommended bootloader: grub (so much easier than lilo and ???linux)

You could, pretty easily, just edit the current minirt24.gz's linuxrc to only load your module, and then maybe sleep some seconds to let it recognize the HD.

If you selected "install grub" during your HD install phase, the file (menu.lst) will already be edited correctly, having options like root=/dev/sd?? in place.