Olivetti Echos P100E

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Olivetti Echos P100E
started by: PandionKnight

Posted by PandionKnight on Jan. 17 2006,15:05

Hi I'm a Linux noob with SuSE10 on my kids pc at home. And I thought it would be fun to try to resurrect an old Olivetti Echos P100E laptop with DSL. Currently the Echos has no OS installed. It has (non-hot) swappable floppy and cd drives. The Pheonix 4.04 1.30.1 BIOS does not allow for boot from cd, only C:, a:, or A: then C:. I have tried looking for a BIOS upgrade with no luck.
I did find this site < Linux on Olivetti >, which mentions using a cable to use the floppy drive connected externally to the parallel port for the boot disk (which I have prepared). The only thing is that this cable was lost long ago. Is this a lost cause?
Shane.

Posted by skaos on Jan. 18 2006,12:18

You have at least two options:
1. Take out the disk, connect it in another PC (disconnect all other hard disks), install DSL and put the disk back.
2. Create a 55-60 MB dos partition and copy the 50 MB knoppix file to c:\knoppix and use a DSL boot diskette or loadlin to boot. I don't know the specifics for booting - search the forum.

Posted by PandionKnight on Jan. 18 2006,14:26

I have just tried option 1 and found that both the qty and spacing of the pins on the 1Gb HDD do not match the IDE socket in modern towers.

Posted by BarkingOwl on Jan. 18 2006,18:07

$9 will get you an adapter cable from < Cables To Go >. This will allow you to connect your laptop HDD to your PC.

Can probably find it elsewhere online for about the same price or a little cheaper.

Cheers!

Posted by PandionKnight on Jan. 19 2006,09:23

Thanks, it looks just the thing. I have found < this > one which I have ordered. I'll let you know how I get on.

Posted by Gatu on Jan. 21 2006,09:48

Hi,
I owned a Olivetti Echos P133 years ago.
I can slightly remember the following procedure:
I used the floppy device for booting (is there a boot floppy for DSL?). Then at the moment when I had to use the cd I put the laptop to "suspend to ram". This worked with the hotkeys and seemed to be independend of OS.
Then I changed the floppy device to the CD.
And then I proceeded with the installation.
But this was many years ago with a very old linux version.
But you can give it a try.
I had no problems in installing or running linuy on that laptop.

Br,
Gatu

Posted by PandionKnight on Jan. 23 2006,15:07

The adapter has arrived and as far as I know I have installed DSL to the HDD, only DSL is not booting. I tried running the install again and it tells me that I need to run cfdisk to build a linux partition. How /where can I run cfdisk?

Posted by skaos on Jan. 23 2006,16:47

Did you try to boot the disk in the desktop? If it doesn't boot there, it could be a problem with the lilo boot loader. You can run cfdisk from the live CD as root. If you don't mind wiping the disk and starting from scratch again you could run this command first:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
This assumes that your disk really is /dev/hda.

Posted by Guest on Jan. 23 2006,19:20

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Loadlin_Install

Works on my laptop. no need for playing with lilo etc.

If you want to make a standard hd install, i tell you instructions.

1) Make a 100 mb fat partition (mine was fat32)
2) Copy files from DSL cd to the partition.
3) Copy isolinux folder from boot folder to the root of the fat32 partiton ( c: has folders: Knoppix, boot, isolinux)
4) Make the options.txt file as mentioned on the link (i needed to change vga=normal to vga=788)
5) Copy loadlin to isolinux folder
6) Boot with dos boot disk (win9x disks works fine)
7) go to isolinux folder
8) Write:
loadlin @options.txt
9) DSL should boot.
10) Make the wanted partitions swap etc. as you like but dont delete the fat32 partition yet.
11) Install dsl.

Thats it i think.