Laptops :: booting problems with 486SX



I'm trying to get DSL onto my old thinkpad 510Cs, which
has an IBM 486BL2-50 cpu (no math coprocessor).
Following advice on this forum, I got the last version
of DSL which boots on 486SX, 0.5.3.1.  I am booting
from the floppy, after copying KNOPPIX onto my hard
drive (d: partition).  The boot starts fine, with the fairly innocuous-looking error message
"You passed an undefined mode number."
The kernel starts booting, KNOPPIX is found on the hard drive, and it starts to load things onto the ramdisk, but then
there is a kernel panic with lots of messages, including
"Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004, segmentation fault, FAT: bogus logical sector size 0, Kernel panic VFS unable to mount root FS on 01:01"

So I am at a dead end for now.  Are there some kernel parameters I could try to pass that might allow me to boot?
Or is there some other solution to the lack of the math
coprocessor?

How much memory do you have?
When I boot windows, it reports
640K base memory + 11456K extended.
The computer comes with 4MB originally installed,
and there is an 8MB DRAM card added.

When I start to boot DSL, it tells me that 9608 kB is the total
available memory.

Hmm...

You MIGHT be able to get away with:

Code Sample
dsl 1 vga=normal atapicd noideraid nosound noapic noacpi acpi=off noscsi noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce


You also may need to add "mem=12M" at the end if you don't see the correct amount of RAM.

If you can't get it to work, you could take a look at: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/
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