[KLUG Members] Help with a pervasive problem.

[Rusty Yonkers]

The only thing that I can think of right off is that
you may have the boot information in the wrong area of
the drive.  I class I am teaching the students to
create a 50 meg partition with a mount point of /boot
as the first partition.  This puts the boot
information at the beginning of the drive.  There is a
known issue that if the boot information is to far
down the drive that there will be problems.  Don't
know if that will help but it is my 2 cents worth.

--- Adam Bultman <adamb@glaven.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Members mailing list
> Members@kalamazoolinux.org
>



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions! 
http://auctions.yahoo.com