My predicament

Forum: HD Install
Topic: My predicament
started by: Autofac

Posted by Autofac on July 20 2005,05:15

Ok, here's the story and it's a damn long one.

I have an older 233 lying around, I knew it was still operational, however prior to reformat of the harddrives it would only go to the very first startup screen and go no further.

Tonight, because I was looking to make it a linux box, running of course, Damnsmalllinux, I reformatted both harddrives (two 1gb). I put them back into the larger machine and things seemed to be going okay.

I downloaded damnsmalllinux, put it to cd, booted it to this machine as a test, worked great, so I went back to try it on the 233- here is where things get wonky.

I knew I would have to set the bios correctly, so that it boots from the cdrom (which is a cdrw- not that it really matters). I go in, and the first thing I notice is that the bios are older and different from other ones I've used, nothing unusual, so I went into the actual bios settings.

The only option I could change which would allow me to alter what it booted from was something called "Bootsequence". In this I was able to choose from a few different options, all of them had at least 2 or three things per line (i.e one option was boot from: SCSI, A, C; SCSI, C, A; C ONLY; LS/ZIP, C; CDROM, A, C; A, E, CDROM etc etc) Utilizing a number of different drive letters. So I tried first CDROM, with no luck, it would just get to "Verifying DMI pool data" and stop cold.

I figured maybe this was an issue with not having anything on the drives, or the computer is too old to recognize cd booting or something. So I decided to make a win98 boot disk, on floppy, which I did and attempted- still only got to Verifying DMI pool data.

FINALLY I realized, after reading the same screen that it wasn't even recognizing either of the harddrives. I am sure they worked, as I had put them into an external case and reformatted from this machine, so it wasn't a question of faulty harddrives.

I am now confused on just what to do, I've tried a bunch of different ribbon cables, tried switching the bios back to booting from A for the boot disk, even tried taking an untouched harddrive WITH 98 on it and plugging it in, but it STILL wouldn't recognize it as actually being there, let alone the master drive.

Any help on this is GREATLY appreciated.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on July 20 2005,05:38

Sounds like a bios issue.

Check the manufacturers website and make sure you have the latest bios for your machine installed.

-J.P.

Posted by Autofac on July 20 2005,06:01

It's pretty old, but I'll give it a go.

EDIT:

What about putting one of the drives into the external drive and installing damnsmall from this machine.

Someone told me I shouldn't as installing that way can lead to many problems and is often unstable?

Posted by spotslayer on July 20 2005,13:08

I have installed DSL and other distributions many times in a faster computer. I just remove the hard drive that I want to install on, put it in the faster box do the install. I then take it and put it back where it is to be used. There are tweaks that will need to be made but that is fine. Watch out for your video resolution. During the initial install I aways try to make sure and set it to a resolution the box that I intend to use will accept. I have almost always had success doing this. Just do it.

David

Posted by cbagger01 on July 20 2005,13:09

If you are experiencing CDROM boot problems with a DSL livecd that you know is OK, I recommend that you download the DSL boot floppy image file from the website and also google for the rawrite or rawrite32 programs and use one of them to creat a DSL boot floppy disk.

Then use the boot floppy to start up DSL

Posted by fpd on July 20 2005,16:59

Your problem is the error "Verifying DMI pool data."

Look for shunt pins to "RESET BIOS" (or is it 'reset cmos' - I can't remember) so your computer has nothing to verify. Sometimes it only takes removing the battery. This might take a few tries.

P.S. If anyone can tell me HOW do I get this forum to recognize that I am registered?