Toshiba Tecra 730cdt

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Toshiba Tecra 730cdt
started by: dmizzel

Posted by dmizzel on April 30 2005,06:11

Toshiba Tecra 730CDT laptop:
100mhz (maybe 199mhz at most) Pentium processor
4g harddrive, 48mb ram
Bios does not support booting from cd-rom; boot from harddrive and floppy only (but I don't have a floppy drive). So...

I bought an adapter to hook up the laptop harddrive to my desktop (pentium III). I booted up DSL1.0.1 from cd and shred the harddrive (bye bye window$) using:

#sudo shred -v -n1 /dev/hda

Then I cfdisk and created 3 partitions:
hda1 bootable 500mb type: Linux (82 I believe)
hda2 about 3000mb type: Linux free space
hda3 about 1000mb type: Linux swap

Next, I was online and did a dsl-hdinstall choosing the enhanced option. Everything installed fine except for lilo, there was an error (which I didn't write down

)
I decided to move on and redo the dsl-hdinstall, this time with only the standard option. Everything went fine, I rebooted and made passwords. I then took the laptop hd out of the desktop, and put it back into the laptop and booted up. Lilo comes up fine, and the boot process begins. Here comes the fun :laugh:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno=2

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k ide-scsi, errno=2

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k ide-cd, errno=2

VFS: cannot open root device "1601" or 16:01
please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:01

I have tried the following boot options with no success:
dsl failsafe
dsl 2
dsl 2 failsafe
dsl noscsi

i'm over my head at this point... any ideas?

Posted by dmizzel on May 08 2005,07:22

anyone?? any ideas?? Am I (or my laptop) hopless?

Posted by cbagger01 on May 09 2005,22:17

Try:

failsafe mem=48M

and make sure that "mem" is lowercase and the "M" at the end is uppercase

For a failsafe boot, don't type

dsl failsafe

Instead:

failsafe

Posted by dmizzel on May 12 2005,18:13

cbagger01, Thanx for the post!

However it's not working. When I boot the laptop,
lilo 22.5.7.2 comes up (it doesn't look anything like a normal dsl from cdrom boot). When I try: failsafe

lilo returns the message: no such image. [tab] shows a list.

Samething happens for: failsafe mem=48M

I also tried both of you suggestions preceeded by: dsl
resulting in the same message in my original post (kernel panic, etc)

Do you think lilo is not configured correctly since it won't accept boot time options that aren't preceeded by dsl?

Posted by cbagger01 on May 13 2005,03:18

You should see the standard syslinux DSL boot screen (from cd)
if you are booting from CD disk.

Otherwise, you need to boot from cd in order to edit your lilo.conf file and add these commands to the append statement and then rerun lilo.

As far as I know, you can't enter cheatcodes (boot parameters) directly from the lilo prompt.

Posted by dmizzel on May 13 2005,21:59

My 1st post (the long one at the top) explains how/why I am booting from an hd install. (bios does not support boot from cd and I don't have a floppy drive).

lilo is not accepting cheatcodes ( boot parameters ) directly from the lilo prompt. It seems as though lilo is trying to BOOT the cheatcode (ie. failsafe ) rather than APPLY the cheatcode while booting dsl. Hence, the error stated in my previous post:

no such image. [tab] shows a list.

The 'list' that the error refers to is the list of possible images or distributions that lilo has avaliable to boot. dsl is the only item in the list.

Posted by cbagger01 on May 13 2005,22:49

OK,

You should be able to boot DSL from your other computer and make the fix and then remove the adapter and put it back into your computer.

Otherwise, the "failsafe" cheatcode is like shorthand for the following cheatcodes:

dsl vga=normal atapicd noscsi nosound nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce nodhcp xmodule=vesa

Maybe you can type this instead of "failsafe" and it will boot. Who knows.

Posted by dmizzel on May 14 2005,08:21

I tried the "failsafe" cheatcode in longform and got the same result 'kernel panic' etc. Thanx for the suggestion!

Eventhough it didn't work

I guess I'll pull the harddrive out again and boot it up in my desktop to see if all is still well with the hd install.

Posted by dmizzel on May 22 2005,05:47

Okay, success!!

It's working! I am posting this so that others might not make the same mistakes I made. And actually I remember seeing this somewhere else on the forms.

Do not use the ' toram ' boot option if you are going to do an ' hdinstall ' or a ' frugal install '