Debian Sarge on old, old hardware!

koobert637 · 06-20-2005, 06:58 PM

Hello all,

I am currently trying to set up a home server with debian sarge on an old box collecting dust in the attic here. It is a 200 Mhz Pentium II with about 196 MB of RAM. This box is about 10 years old. I downloaded the sarge net inst cd image and burnt it to a cd, and it boots just fine (to my utter suprise

). However, when it gets to the part where it detects my cd drives and other hardware, the whole thing hangs when it's trying to load the module ide-disk. I can load the module fine from the command line (modprobe -v ide-disk) however I noticed that after that ide-generic would not load!!! I found this bug report on the debian mailing lists: lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg01215.html (http removed, i have less than 5 posts???), but there doesn't seem to be a solution listed. If anyone could help, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
koobert

macondo · 06-20-2005, 07:11 PM

My box is a PII 266 128 MB RAM, it works perfectly, here's the installation guide:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=330

koobert637 · 06-20-2005, 08:03 PM

Thanks for the quick reply macondo, but my real problem is the ide modules not loading, which is not covered in your guide (fabulous though it may be

) I tried the boot options in your guide, as well as ide=nodma to no avail. If you have any other suggestions, they are appreciated!

Noth · 06-20-2005, 10:11 PM

That hardware isn't that old, I had sarge installed on a Sun Ultra1 167Mhz with 128M of memory which was probably closer to 15 years old.

Did you try linux26? The reporter of the bug you mentioned couldn't because he could only boot from floppy.

Thorium · 06-21-2005, 01:49 AM

I throw debian 3.1 on my p166 with 64 megs of ram, and I didn't use the net install because I don't have a nic in it and the moment and accidentally picked the desktop packages forgetting it installs gnome and kde, that was not fun

It actually ran gnome, kind of

Only about oh...12 minutes for a boot into gnome

koobert637 · 06-21-2005, 10:25 AM

Noth: Yea I tried linux26, no luck though. It still failed when it tried to load ide-disk and ide-generic.

I also tried booting the gentoo live cd, kanotix, and the ubuntu hoary installer, with no luck. The only thing that worked was the slackware install cd, which I used to install slack. I am now compiling dpkg and cdebootstrap to install debian to another partition, and intend to boot from that and format the slack partition for use as my /var (pretty ingenious eh? I think I might write a howto!

). Thanks for the help anyway!

Thorium: Ouch!