DSL crashes at startup

Forum: Laptops
Topic: DSL crashes at startup
started by: tduthel

Posted by tduthel on Jan. 17 2005,09:43

Hi everybody,
I triend to install DSL on an old P90 laptop with 8MB RAM.
To get the image on the harddisk I used the frugal_lite.sh skript as propsed in the download FAQ section. In addition I created a swap partition (fdisk and mkswap afterwards) The script terminated without errors.
Booting from the created FDD worked, but everytime DSL is accessed on the HDD the system crashes and the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock LEDs are blinking.
I tried the following bootoptions in combination: noapic noagp noapm nodma nomce nofirewire nopcmcia noscsi nousb nosmp noaudio but no improvement.
When I start failsafe the systems stops with the following errror message: error reading ELF section data /modules/cloop.o

Any suggestions.
Thanks

Thomas

Posted by skaos on Jan. 17 2005,12:00

Try "dsl 2" (without quotes) at the boot prompt; this should launch you into command line only - 8 MB is not sufficient for a graphical user interface.

Posted by tduthel on Jan. 17 2005,12:21

Quote (skaos @ Jan. 17 2005,07:00)

Try "dsl 2" (without quotes) at the boot prompt;

I allready tried this (forgot to mention) with the same result as described above.
Futhermore I tried to install other distributions on this machine. The onyl one I could make work was Suse 6.2. As far as I know Suse 6.2 comes with kernel 2.2.
Is it possibel that Kernel 2.4 does not work with that low memory?

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 19 2005,18:23

It sounds like your problem is with the LILO bootloader and not the kernel.

If you can successfully boot up DSL using the floppy disk, then the problem is not the kernel.

I would try one of these alternatives:

1) Try installing the grub bootloader instead of lilo.

2) Use the boot floppy instead of the hard drive bootloader.

3) Boot up in MSDOS and then use the loadlin program to automatically launch linux in your AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files.

Search the forums for keyword

grub

or

loadlin

and search ALL FORUMS and FROM THE BEGINNING Or NEWER for more help.

Also, another possibility is that you don't have enough memory for the fullsize minirt.gz file in your computer.

In this case, do this:

Boot from the floppy drive.

Mount your hard drive.

Rename the minirt.gz file on your hard drive to minirt.gz.old

and then copy the minirt.gz file from your floppy disk over to your hard drive.

Then try rebooting without the floppy.

It might just work.