Julian Richardson (JRichardson@softwright.co.uk)
Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:47:57 -0000
Hi all,
I want to install RedHat (well, any Linux distribution really!) onto a
Gateway Colorbook laptop (20Mb memory, 340Mb disk) which has a
MicroSolutions Backpack CDROM connected via the parallel port.
I can boot off the RedHat boot disk, select "other" (ie. not SCSI) CDROM
drive, tell it to autodetect the backpack drive, at which point the
CDROM light comes on and all seems well. However, I get a register dump
on screen after a few seconds (sorry, can post all that here if it
helps; seem to remember there was mention of a timeout in there
somewhere)
So:
a) is it 'safe' to autodetect this drive? Or should I
specify manual parameters (in which case, what?)
b) I pulled the case off the backpack drive (out of curiousity;
the drive's on loan and I wondered if I could clone the interface
and build my own using a spare 4x drive) and there's an
empty socket on the interface board that could be for buffer
memory - could the lack of such memory and Linux trying to
drive the CDROM too hard be causing the problem?
c) Is there anything simple I've overlooked? I was given a pile of
laptops so have no manuals or anything (the backpack drive
does work fine in DOS though)
any ideas anyone??
oh, and while I'm at it - some of you may have come across this problem
before: I tried booting Slackware on this Gateway, and it loads the
boot disk fine, but then when it asks me to put the root disk in I do so
and it comes back with something along the lines of "no ramdisk image
found". I know it's a good floppy disk and have tried a couple of
different root disks (both gzipped though, is that a problem?). Any
ideas on that one? Any floppy-related parameters that I can try whilst
booting to get around the problem? It almost looks like the old disk
change line fault that sometimes used to appear on machines running DOS,
but but the disk sounds like it's accessed before this error appears...
cheers for any help!
Jules
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sun 28 Mar 1999 - 17:07:28 EST