n00b in a bit of trouble
 

Hello there.

I'm having a bit of trouble setting up a router on my old computer.

It's a K6 233 160Mb RAM with a Quantum 4Gb hdd on a PC Chips M575 mobo.

I'm trying to install smoothwall and it detects my hard drive, but when it scans the partitons is can't read it, spitting out an error about "waiting for DMA" or something like that.

Any idea's how to fix this? Or do you have any other distro suggestions that a linux n00b could handle?

Many thanks,
Unts.

edit: I should have mentioned I use a Realtek NIC for LAN and a Teles BRI PCI ISDN TA for the net.

try to disable it in the bios

it depends on the version you have, but you may also try slackware, or redhat. They are slightly ahead of mandrake.

I was going to try mandrake on it but it's so slow on that computer (even v7.2)

That's why I want a small package dedicated to routing.

For some reason I can't disable DMA in the BIOS, there's no option. It's only an ATA33 board anyway, I might get an ATA card and try that!

Any more suggestions?

Cheers.

yea, if you just want a router then try one of the older versions.

I use RH 6.2

you can get updates from redhat ftp or one of the mirrors


try windowmaker for your wm, if you need one. it's faster than kde or gnome

You could use "dhparm -d 0 </dev/thisharddisk>" to try and disable using DMA for the HD.

It's not DMA that's the problem. I downloaded the version 2 GPL of smoothwall and I get the same problem with not being able to read partitions. I got the same on another computer too. I'm going to try a tool that will low level format the target hard drive, hopefully enabling the smoothwall setup program to create it's own mbr and read it!

One thing about this thread is bugging me.

The fact that smoothwall is mentioned with every sentence that says there is a problem


if it's just smoothwall with the problem then I would not try to fix anything else. It could be that there is a problem with smoothwall.


if you run fdisk and view the partitions it will almost certainly let you know if there's a partition table problem.

Also you could mount the partition read-only and fsck it.

if no problems show up then it's got to be smoothwall maybe trying to read the wrong filesystem or something.

I would not even worry with smoothwall if it's the problem, and just put in some good rules for your router using iptables.