[RULE] Re: My 486 won't boot

[C David Rigby]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 02:21, Daniel O'Neill wrote:
> Ok so heres the update: MSDOS 5.0 installed (this is a means to an end, it
> is not me retreating!) MuLinux installed on that partition, RedHat still
> not booting! I'm about to get a sledge-hammer, details further down.
> 
> On the jumpers settings: The CDROM was set to slave and there doesn't
> appear to be any jumpers on the hard drive. The HDD is hard to get to but
> I checked it out with a mirror and couldn't find jumpers where you
> normally expect them to be. Trying not to sound like a moany bitch,
> but is this one worth chasing up, the HDD is in an akward place.
> 

Daniel,
	It may well be that "no jumpers" is the default master setting for the
HDD, and thus things are as they should be.  I concur - don't drive
yourself crazy with hardware work at this point.

> I have tried various hardware cofigs. With CDROM witout HDD and vica
> verca, no joy. Unfortunatly there is only one card slot on the
> motherboard, so my options there are limited aswell.
> 
> Now the small bit of progress I have made:
> MSDOS 5.0 doen't recognize the CDROM but MuLinux and Tom's do.

MSDOS will need a separate driver program for the CD-ROM drive, as well
as the program MSCDEX.EXE to assign it a drive letter.  A year ago I
could have sent you the necessary programs, but a recent move resulted
in the loss of much of my collection of older hardware and software. 
You might try the software offered by this project to see if it can
provide you with a functional DOS-like system:

http://www.freedos.org/

But see below for a more direct approach.

> 1st Tom's root-boot:
>     Mounted both floppy and cd
>     For the floppy:
>     ls reports that vmlinuz is present. (this is the install program,
>     right?)
>     vmlinuz returns: "vmlinuz not found"
> 

Actually, vmlinuz is the linux kernel (the core of the operating
system).  It must be compiled to be useful, and in that state you will
not be able to edit with standard DOS editors.

>     For the CDROM:
>     Same story, tried autorun and it returns "autorun not found"
>     I found vmlinuz in the isolinux directory
> 
> 2nd MuLinux:
>     Mounted both floppy and cd
>     For the floppy:
>     running vmliuz returns: " vmlinuz: 1: Syntax error: ")" unexpected "
> 
>     For the CDROM:
>     vmlinuz returns " vmlinuz: premission denied "
>     auto run returns:
>         " exec: /usr/bin/redhat-cdinstall-helper: not found "
>     I went looking for this file on the cd and haven't been able to find
>     it (yet!)
> 

Is the CD that you are using the RULE slinky CD?  If so, it does not
have an autorun program in the DOS/Windows sense.  Instead, it is a
bootable CD.  The initial installation script is "inside" the initial
rootdisk image, which is the file /dosutils/initrd.img.  At this point,
you should not need to edit or change what is in here.

On other systems that I have worked with that did not support booting
from the CD, I used a program called Smart Boot Manager, which resides
on a floppy disk.  You boot from the floppy, and you are then provided
with a menu that will let you choose from various other devices such as
the HD or the CD as the desired boot device.  It might be worth trying:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

So try this:  Create the Smart Boot Manager disk and try to boot from
it.  If you get to a menu that shows other drives to boot from, put the
Slinky CD in your CD drive and select the CD-ROM from the Smart Boot
menu.

> A friend recommended that I try to adjust the scripts to deal with the
> syntax error, I tought that this was a little beyond my abilities. One
> quick look at the file vmlinuz in wordpad confirmed my suspicions! Does
> this mean I have to decomplie it if I want to mess with it. I think I
> have a decompiler in the shed next to the kango-hammer!!!
>      Anybody got any suggestions as to how I could proceed? MuLinux is
> running off of a DOS partition and booting from a floppy, would it help
> running vmlinuz if I cloned MuLinux? I tried it allready and it got messy,
> I'm just wonderin if it's a good idea before I have another go at it.
> 

At this point, I do not believe that this would assist you much.

> Daniel O'Neill
> 
> 'You can put a cat in an oven but that doesn't make it a biscuit'
> 
> 
> 

Bon courage!

CDR
> 
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