Help! Cannot boot

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Help! Cannot boot
started by: tangys

Posted by tangys on July 28 2005,19:56

i am trying DSL on an old P1, 64 MB RAM.
getting "Directory sread fail"

any clues? tried failsafe option, still the same.

Posted by tangys on July 28 2005,19:57

it was complaining something about FAT cannot get the signature FSINFO

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on July 29 2005,15:08

That is a strange error. Doesn't sound like too many people have heard of it. The only thing I can think of (in my limited knowledge) is, perhaps, that the disk was not burned properly. Did you check it against the md5 when you downloaded it? Have you tried to boot the disk from another machine?

Posted by tangys on July 29 2005,17:03

yes, the CD works on another machine. also tried other live-CDs on this machine (eg. knoppix), and it works.

Posted by cbagger01 on July 29 2005,17:55

Try booting from the livecd with or without floppy and with this boot command:

failsafe noswap nofstab norestore

and see if you get somewhere.

It sounds to me like the partition table on your hard drive is corrupted. But I could be wrong.

Posted by tangys on July 30 2005,17:30

hmmm ... partition table problem ... that's an interesting suggestion.

does DSL need to have a FAT partition on hda to work? i happen to have only linux partitions on hda. no M$ products were used to create the hda partition table.

an aside: does DSL need a raw partition when using the tohd cheatcode? (something like poorman install?)

Posted by cbagger01 on July 30 2005,22:43

DSL does not require a FAT partition in order to work.

Another way to verify this is to temporarily unplug your hard drive and try DSL again.