[KLUG Members] Help with a pervasive problem.

[Adam Bultman]

I don'w know if I have written about this before, so here it goes:

System:
Gigabyte Motherboard w/ AC 97 audio
Duron 900
256 MB RAM
3COM 3C980B NIC
Symbios SCSI card with attached 10k RPM drive
Quantum Bigfoot (ick) drive
WD 40 GB drive.
Voodoo3 3000

okay. this system will NOT run linux. At least, it won't boot itself.  
I've installed some 3 distros on it, and <i>it will not boot</i>.  The 
install goes fine-- on the SCSI drive, on the bigfoot, etc.  When it comes 
to booting, it will start-- just fine, I might add-- but it fails, says 
that memory is bad, blah blah blah, and it dies.  Sending the Three Finger 
Salute doesn't even help, it catches it, and displays how THAT failed.  

The RAM is fine, the drives are fine, and the system will boot from a boot 
disk, or better yet, the Slackware Boot CDROM, but it will not boot 
itself!  This has been the single most frustrating problem I have ever 
encountered because I so badly want to run linux on it.  And every time I 
try, it fails.  I want to say it's something with initrd, and the 
ramdisks, but I'm not sure-- because beehive linux ran fine on it, and I'm 
sure that didn't use initrd. Question is, can I remove that?  does initrd 
really DO anything, or is it just to 'speed things up'?  This system would 
rock if it only booted to the kernel without a boot disk.  Maybe I'll just 
have to screw it all and stick with beehive and it's coolness.  I wanted 
redhat for Evolution (I have neither the time nor the patience to 
discover, find, download, and install the million dependencies, and the 
million other non-recoverable dependences that crop up) but shucks, it 
looks like I'm still screwed.

Has anyone else had this roblem?    It's making me go insane, one reboot 
at a time.

adam

-- 
Adam Bultman
adamb@glaven.org