jkarns wrote:
In your 1st msg you mentioned lilo hanging after displaying "LI" on the screen. According to one of the lilo readme's, this is usually indicative of an inability of lilo being unable to ascertain the geometry of the disk, and is apparently more common with some SCSI controller/drive configurations. I just experienced this with a DTC 3130 (I believe) controller and a Quantum Viking II drive. The solution was to put the geomtery lines in the lilo config:
bios=0x80 cylinders=blah heads=blah sectors=blah
This information was displayd by linux fdisk, but for some reason was not available to lilo.
very good suggestion..where exactly would one put that?where would I get the bios setting?
Another point re Linux on Compaq: I had installed SuSE 5.1 on my Presario 1070 laptop as a dual-boot with W95, and it seemed to run OK for a few weeks. Then started to cause hangs and reboots when trying to mount/dismount the CD and DOS partitions. I re-installed but continued to have the problem. Finally I tried Slakware (3.4 I believe) and it seems to run better, although ocassionally I will experience the problem.
I should also mention that I have upgraded the disk from the original 1G to 4G, which is unsupported by Compaq. IOW, they won't sell anything other than the 1G to run in these machines. They seem to deisgn these things in such a way that very tightly couples the hardware components. I also experienced a similar reboot problem when I attempted to upgrade the RAM fom 16 to 32 using 3rd party memory.
ok an update is in order Ive installed Suse on the compaq deskpro 590 I installed 2 hds 1 a 650M the other an 850M everything seems ok with that except the modem whish needs to be identified in the compaqs settings so far so good. As Jurgen mentioned the message regarding "if you're runnning unix you have to use the diagnostic program" He was correct, I never see that message <vbg> just the memory counting up... then lilo booting from the mbr. X and kde are setup and for me this is a big step up (to a pentium 90) for linux also when I tried to add the cdrom originally the system diddnt want it but upon installing linux it dectected it and thats working now! :-) Now the other hosed drive remains.... Ive got to look into running ex2fsck and seeing what I can do to fix that. That drive came out of a ps/1 x66 with 32ram and although it was slow with netscape it held its own. Id really like to get that disk back can anyone tell me specifically how to boot from a floppy and run ex2fsck? OR... any other ideas to repair it the status is the drive will boot and eventuall get to a somewhat working system however while booting I get these messages the go on and on maybe 20 or 30x hda: irq timeout: status=0xd2 {busy} ide0: reset: success: hda: irq timeout: status=0xd2 {busy} ide0: reset: success: hda: irq timeout: status=0xd2 {busy} ide0: reset: success: on and on then I get to a system prompt and everything seems ok but on some commands it says the hd not is ready for a command gos on to repeat that 10x or so thanks for all your feedback so far and hopefully I can get the 1200M samsung going again without reinstalling. Ive got alot of custom settings that id hate to loose. rob Bookmarks <A HREF="http://www.connix.com/~dizzy73/LBM.htm"><A HREF="http://www.connix.com/~dizzy73/LBM.htm</A">http://www.connix.com/~dizzy73/LBM.htm</A</A>> - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e