I'm sorry if I'm rehashing a problem that has allready been addressed, but my patience is wearing a little thin and I'm feeling a little out of my depth.
I'm trying to set up a dual boot system. My 486's (affectionatly named Bob) BIOS is too old to allow CDROM boot. Systems details in the form of a msd report at
www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~danj/Report.txt Please note this report is somewhat misleading (a fact I hope to rectify soon) as it was made when I was running Win95 and taking up alot of space.
I have since formatted the hard disk, started running Win98, and partitioned the drive (c. 450Mb total) leaving about 200Mb for Lunix.
I have availible to me RedHat 6.2 and 8.0.
The only sucessfull boot so far has been Tom's root-boot. All others including Miniconda, Slinky, Slinky-Detect, Floppix and the boot images that came with the CD's and some from RedHat errata have failed in the same manner. Incedetially installations of Suze (8.1 I think) have failed in the same manner.
The 486 starts up, shows me a dialog box with some rudimentary hardware and BIOS settings, then the CDROM drive LED blinks, followed by what I assume is the machine acessing the A-drive (incl. relevant LED flashing and accompaning sounds), and then the screen displays the message: boot failed. The machine then just hangs, while I curse and tear more of my hair out!
At this stage I'm looking at small Linux's like muLinux, to see if I can use them, that and I'm looking into using RAWRITE on the 486 instead of P3's to see if that'll make a difference.
It seems to me that RULE should work but doesn't and I'd rather not try to write my own boot disks! Am I missing something here? Is there some basic step I've overlooked?
I'd be gratefull for any help, even if it's just pointing me to the relevant documentation or mail list archive.
Thanks,
Daniel O'Neill
'You can put a cat in an oven but that doesn't make it a biscuit.'