I've recently bought a nice new computer:

AMD K7 something with 1.4GHz 266FSB.
256Mb PC133 RAM.
Abit Siluro (NVidia GeForce 2 MX).
Blaady blaady blah!

My intial install of Mandrake 8 works absolutely fine, but I want to reconfigure my kernal to make specific use of my processor (instead of defaulting to i586). I've tried several times but each time I come up against problems:

When booting it fscks all partitions and finds a silly number of errors on each which I know don't exist! After a while it just stops doing anything and I find that it seems to have mangled my vfat partitions aswell (I'm not quite sure how it's done this, may be just a mangling of partition information rather than the partitions themselves) so I have to start over again from the beginning (install windows, install linux, install software, etc). I'm putting this down to not using my VIA chipsets properly.

My question is this:

Since the 'out of the box' install works with my system, is there a way of keeping these settings and only changing the processor type?

(I know it seems simple, but I still couldn't figure this out after many, many hours of swearing).

go to where your kernel source is:
cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.x
edit the top .config options with help from (I think) /usr/src/linux-2.4.x/Documentation/config.help
or
run X, go to the X source, and run "make xconfig".
next to changing processor type, you want to look further, theres lotsa support for b0rken chipsets, etc, etc.

Yep, been there, done that...

I've tried to reconfigure my kernel several times but come up with problems. Using 'make xconfig' everything defaults to a default setting (as it would, being a default) and these do not seem to be those which the 'out-of-the-box' kernel is actually using.

I've been through all the settings (this does not worry me, as I was constantly cocking things up on my old PII and having to do drastic things like re-installing) and used those which I think represent my system. And how wrong can I be? (A hint: very, it seems).

What I'd really like is to find the 'settings' that work with my system so that I can remember them for future reference (i.e. when building a newer new kernel), but I'd rather not have to go through the process of cocking things up and then re-installing (both Lin & Win).

Oh, yeah, tried making a test floppy (leaving the original kernel on the HD and booting from the 'new' one on a floppy) and it does exactly the same.

Thanks for the advice tho'.

What chipset are you using? I am typing this from a Althlon 1.4 Ghz. with the AMD 761/VIA768B chipset combo (the IDE controllers are on the VIA part) and it works just fine. The only chipset specific feature in my kernel is the AGP stuff and that is purely optional. What motherboard is it and does it include an IDE controller like the HPT370? Given a few more details I might be able to help.