I have this old pc I want to put linux on. Here are the specs :

Pentium 100 / Tomato intel VX or FX 5XPD (not too certain, not home atm cant look it up) / 48mb ram / Realtek 10mbit / Soundblaster Pro / Afree 52x speed atapi cd-rom / Ami Bios / 1.2Gb Seagate drive

Now this should normally be a breeze although this system can't boot from cd-rom. Put a floppy in the drive boot it and start the install from cdrom.

However I think the floppy port is broken. I can't get it to work, no matter how I connect the cable to the Floppy drive. Tried 3 different cables and an equal amount of drives.

What would be the next step to try?

Also I would like to mention, 2 pci ports and 3 isa ports are still available. But I don't really feel like putting in another floppy controller. As I would need to search around to find one...don't have it laying around.

Greetings

Habala

buy a new system from ebay for next to nothing and try again.

Does the floppy itself work in another PC?
Silly question, but is the bootsequence correct (A first)?
Do you get any error messages?
Is there already an OS on the HD?

dump the machine and get a new one. it'll cost you nothing.

Thanks for your reply.

I should have mentioned this but yes all the floppy drives work in other systems, even all the cables work. That's why I suspect the onboard fdd controller to be broken. The bootsequence in the BIOS is currently set to floppy followed by the harddrive, no cdrom or fancy usb options :-)

As for error messages I do get a message saying that no bootdevice can be found. The harddrive did have windows 98 on it but it got cleared on my request before I got the drive from a friend. I did not know at this time the onboard fdd controller would have been broken.

Habala

well, what you could do, is take the Hard Drive and put it onto a different computer then put linux on it then put it back into the older system.

I know when it installs it wont install the right drivers for your older system, but when it starts up in the older system is should detect the different hardware, and install new drivers.

well good luck!

I was referring to the floppy (disk) itself, not the floppy drives. Sorry that that was not clear.

I have tried with 2 different floppies, both new out of the pack. But the system does say something very briefly about floppy drive A: not found, but only for a very brief moment and after that immediately wants to load an os from the harddrive.

Yesterday I put the drive into another system (Celeron 900 / Gigabyte 810e chipset / Toshiba DVD / 512Mb ram), and proceeded to install ubuntu.

Everything went fine, however at the end when the installer tries to install Grub, I got some error about the installer not being able to write to the masterboot record. I then stopped trying with grub and selected the older option Lilo, however this turned up a similar error.

Now I 'm a bit uncertain, but before the installer asked me to install grub it gave me two options on where to install the bootloader (if I'm not mistaken). I choose MBR, maybe I should try the other option. Will try that again tonight.

P.S. : Is Ubuntu a good distro for this? What other distro's might be well suited?

I like the RedHat distros

Its nothing to do with the distribution. Its the lilo config you are trying to use. show it here. i suspect that you probably have an old style HDD.

from memory: if the line: LBA32 or something like that is in there replace it with `linear'.

I realise that, however I meant for hardware detection. As i can imagine that the system will have to do some redetecting after it's been installed on one system and afterwards booted in another.

The error happened at the last stages of the install with the harddrive in the Celeron 900 system. Whenever it wants to write the bootrecord.

I can't remember seeing anything about the actual config being displayed, perhaps because it's the only OS installed on it?

Furthermore this LBA32 wouldn't have anything to do with the LBA option in your bios? Don't think the old system has such an option but the newer one has. Perhaps I should try and install it with this option disabled.

Well, I will play around a bit more later on today, when i get back home from work. I will then try to find out what lines are in the lilo config that the installer tries to write.

Thanks.

as you still havent posted any configuration then its difficult to diagnose.

Your PC might have a virus protection in the BIOS that prevents the MBR from being overwritten.
This might be enabled on your machine. Just disable it and try again. It's not said that this is the cause, but it's often overlooked.
I don't know how well Ubuntu behaves on redetection of the HW. Check the Ubuntu site and the Ubuntu forums

bloody good idea wim.