Toshiba 400CDT

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Toshiba 400CDT
started by: Medix

Posted by Medix on Dec. 16 2004,02:20

Hi all,
I've been attempting to get DSL to run on an old Toshiba 400CDT laptop, and I'm having problems right off the bat. The unit is equipped with 16megs of memory and runs at about 75Mhz. It's got a cdrom drive, but it won't boot from the drive, so I had to use the boot floppy method to install. The normal boot screen comes up, finds the image and goes all the way to the part where it says:
"Creating directories and symlinks on ramdisk.. "

THEN :angry:

I get the following error..

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address (address goes here, changes from time to time)

This is then followed by various CPU and call trace information (stack trace, etc), and then finally it says:

Segmentation fault

On occasion I get two of these faults.. I've tried passing options to the kernel at boot, but still nothing. I've tried different versions of DSL (all the way back to 0.5), tried copying the image to the HDD, and EVEN tried swapping out the memory..

but always the same error..

I was able to get Slackware 10 to install without any problem.. but it's a bit large for what I want to do.. I'm just trying to build a digital picture frame..

Any thoughts would be a great help..

- Medix :cool:

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 16 2004,03:42

Try booting with the:

dsl mem=16M

boot command. Make sure that the "M" after the 16 is an upper case letter.

Posted by Medix on Dec. 16 2004,03:54

That did it!

And I call myslef a linux user..

You'd think I would have thought of that when I started..

Thanks again for the help!

- Medix

Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 16 2004,17:20

Welcome to the Revolution!!!

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by Medix on Dec. 17 2004,22:23

This whole 'small linux distro' idea is definitely a revolution! I've been using a distro called Freesco for almost 4 years now, and I absolutely LOVE the fact that I don't have to PAY for expensive hardware.. All you need is a small distro and a little know-how..

If I can find more software that's available for my research, I'm gonna force myself to use only linux.. Windoze has GOT to go..

Thanks again for the help!

- Medix :cool:

Posted by Medix on Dec. 18 2004,00:28

One more question..

I managed the HDD install just fine, and lilo boots ok..

except that I still need to pass parameters to the kernel to make it boot properly (as in mem=16M). I can update the lilo.conf in /etc on the root partition, but then how do I get lilo to update itself? I tried to modify the 'mkliloboot' script so that the append=" " would include the parameters I need to pass, but the file system is read only..

Any thoughts? I may try to copy it to the root partition and mess with it there..

- Medix :cool:

Posted by Medix on Dec. 18 2004,00:46

Looks like I answered my own question..

I copied the 'mkliloboot' script to the HDD and modified the 'append=" " ' section to include the kernel parameters that I need..

With that said, I have a request for future versions of DSL.. why not modify the 'mkliloboot' script to prompt for custom kernel parameters so that others don't have to go through all this messing around. (unless there's already a way to do this during the lilo install)

my $0.02 worth

- Medix