boot fail on install disk
 

I have been trying to start a linux installation on a win 98 (not SE) system with Celeron 400 MHz, 192 MB memory, amibios
BIOS Date: 07/15/95
BIOS Type: American Megatrends licensed to Intel
BIOS ID: 61-0828-143700-00101111-071595-440BX-1440B000
OEM Sign-On: S760 BIOS RELEASE v1.04 (11/14/98)
Chipset: Intel 440BX/ZX rev 3

I set the boot sequence to boot from floppy then CDROM then HD. I've tried booting with CD-ROMs from Knoppix Hacks, Mandrake 8.0 and RedHat 5.2. The computer doesn't see any of these as a boot disk even though it tries to boot from CDROM and eventually just boots Win 98 from the HD. I then tried booting from the floppy with the Mandrake 8.0 floppy boot disk and I created a boot floppy for RedHat 5.2 using rawrite and the image on the 5.2 CD-ROM. With either floppy it recognizes a bootable floppy and then types for example
Syslinux 1.48 Linux-Mandrake
and shortly after that
Boot failed
with no other messages so I have to reset or turn off and start again.
similar result with the RedHat disk.

Could my old amibios be the problem?

should I update it from esupport .com?

or should I try changing the config file to pass memory size or some other option?

I'm also wondering if the bios settings for shadow cache of the bios could be
interfering with making the ramdisk at startup. It is currently set to shadow cache 16 K starting at C000 and C400, I thought of disabling this cache but don't have a clue what I'm doing so I'm nervous to try it.

Any ideas? It is particularly frustrating to think that I can't even boot fromt he Knoppix disk. It isn't even recognized as bootable and I haven't been able to open it even under win 98 although I have been able to boot from it on newer computers so I don't think the CD is bad. I should say too, that I created a dual boot win95 and Mandrake 8.0 on an old HP Pavilion 3100 with 166 MHz Pentium from the Mandrake CDROM. Although I couldn't boot from the Knoppix Hacks CDROM on that system (maybe the drive is too old.)

Thanks

Do whats easier before. Don't update your bios unless you really have to.

Floppy disks are such an unreliable media. I did a debian install on an old amd k6 with no cdrom, and it took like 7 or 8 floppies until I could write three good ones.

Try to use these floppies on different machines, and see if they are good.

Try to grab another cdrom drive and mount it in the computer, just for installing.

I see floppy disks as necessary evils.

Thank you, I will try installing a new Sony DVD-ROM/CDRW and let you know what happens tomorrow. I had already tried replacing the CDROM dirve with a newer, but still old, Phillips CDRW and that had problems figuring out what kind of disk was inserted or that I had removed a disk (after resetting to interupt its forever spin) so I just bought the new Sony drive.

I installed the Sony CRX320AE CD-RW/DVD ROM and you were right, a newer drive made all the difference. I was able to boot to Knoppix 3.4 linux 2.4.26 without upgrading the BIOS.

Thanks again
:-)

you´re welcome!