Want to install DSL on an old pc

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Want to install DSL on an old pc
started by: Jouster

Posted by Jouster on Nov. 03 2006,20:54

Hello,

I've got an old pentium 3 pc and i want to install dsl on it.
So i burned the DSL iso and boot from the cd.
I have one big partition hda1 for everyting so I install it on hda1 and choose as bootloader Grub when i reboot my computer it says:
Grub loading stage1.5

Grub loading, please wait...
Error 16

What do i have to do?

Sorry for my bad English im Dutch :;):

Greetings, Jouster

Posted by u2musicmike on Nov. 03 2006,22:29

Jouster,

I haven't had many problems with grub but that error could be caused by the BIOS or harddrive errors. I had an old pc that windows messed up the harddrive so I wiped it clean with a windows 98 boot disk, ran format, and scandisk then I booted the DSL CD with boot option dsl 2. From the command line I typed fdisk /dev/hda and made two partitions hda1 type 82 100Meg for swap and hda2 type 83 for the rest. Then I typed mkswap /dev/hda1, mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda2, and swapon /dev/hda1. After that I rebooted and did the install. I have heard sometimes lilo works better on older pcs.

Posted by ohio_js on Nov. 03 2006,22:46

I had the same error message many times with many distros. All it means is Grub did not install 100% the correct way. It is looking for files inside the /boot directory. When a file is not there, or not the way it should be, you will get an error code.

Just install it again. and don't leave after the two beeps. It installs on its own if you don't type g for the grub bootloader.

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 04 2006,01:54

It could be a faulty harddrive. I recently tried a frugal install on an older machine several times and received the same error. After changing the drive and performing the same steps as before it installed without trouble.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 04 2006,06:21

Some older comps don't go well with grub - unless there's some patch/workaround for that, but I've always used lilo on older hardware.

Posted by Jouster on Nov. 04 2006,15:11

I tried to reinstall the way u2musicmike said but if I reboot i get error 17 I'm a linux noob i don't know what i have to do now.

Posted by u2musicmike on Nov. 06 2006,14:29

Jouster,

Grub error 17 is saying it doesn't see your harddrive partition. When you used the DOS bootdisk did you delete all of the partitions? Maybe the MBR is corrupt? Some BIOS have a hidden partition and might not start where grub wants. You can try to reinstall grub:

grub-install /dev/hda

Posted by skaos on Nov. 06 2006,15:47

If you suspect a faulty drive: badblocks -svw /dev/hda
Please note that the "w" option overwrites everything on the disk.
If you want to wipe your disk and start from scratch: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Posted by glue on Nov. 08 2006,15:20

I just put DSL on a P233 and it made me create 2 partitions with the first being for swapfiles and DSL going on hda2.

< The instructions I followed >.

Posted by Jouster on Nov. 10 2006,18:15

When I type grub-install /dev/hda it says /dev/cloop does not have any corresponding BIOS drive