old hardware, new drive, panic
 

Just put a 120GB drive in an old (1995) PC, as a slave on the primary controller. D: in DOS. Put amigo on D, and am getting a kernel panic on startup of amigo.

This bios is old enough to need the dynamic mapping from WD to handle the 120mb partition. Amigo seems to note this during startup. Finds it as hdb1

Amigo mounts the root, but then has a panic, saying something about not being able to init

Is there something special needed to conigure this drive, or do I just need to break it into smaller partitions? It's bare right now except for the linux directory.

Thanks.

John

An update
 

I copied the \linux\ directory to my primary drive, altered the loadlin batch file, and now it boots Amigo well. Did the "easy" config. Logged into root, gave it startx, then the fun started.

My PC is a 1995 Gateway DX2-66, with Aries motherboard, upgraded to a Kingston Turbo Chip 133mhz cpu, 44MB memory (80 is max for this board), running Win98se. It has built-in Cirrus video on the motherboard. This last one may be the problem. hda1 is 2.1gb, hdb1 is 120gb.

Amigo was unable to start x-windows. Something about "no screens" found. I did not take notes from the screen, but can take some digital photos of it if specifics are needed.

This forum is fairly new, so I'll dig around here and in the slackware forum to see what it takes for this old box. May not be a big deal in the long term, since I plan to use this as a file server and a platform on which to learn something about linux. Although for a person who resisited using a mouse for years (after PCs came out), I have become somewhat used to a windows environment.

another update.. used xf86config to set card to cirrus logic gd5434, 1mb memory, monitor to 31.5-48, 54mhz, 800x600 and still get a "no screens" failure on startx. Monitor is crystalscan 1024ni, and i got the specs on it.

Any idea what I'm missing? A place to look?

run:
/usr/lib/amigosetup/pristine
then, reboot and choose the second option for graphics configuration(Xconfigurator ADVANCED). This will let you test the configuration and back up and change things before exiting.
Those old on-board cirrus chips are problematic.

As for the big drive -use Amigo's fdisk to break that up into smaller partitions. FAT partitions are best created no larger than 2GB. Make sure and creat a small(2GB or less) first primary partition, then a couple of primaries, and an extended partion for the rest, which can be split up into several logical drives. None of them need to have the bootable flag set for Amigo to work.

Thanks for the expert advice. Unfortunately, my PC still does not run startx, even though I found the exact monitor I have using the advanced video config. I'm thinking it may relate to the cirrus driver. I might need to edit the config file directly to deal with this one. I saw a post with something about cirrus vesa with no chipset specified. I have the correct H and V scan frequency info, from the gateway web site. I've tried that and picking the monitor from the list. Must be the card. The card is supposed to have 1mb on board. Might some of that be bad? I even tried telling it to run monochrome, and still "no screens."

I guess another option would be to pick up a used vid card on ebay. Should be plenty, with so many people putting in hot cards for games.

Any other thoughts?

Sorry I can't help much more. I have an old 486 with one of these cirrus chips which I tried , briefly , to get going.
I think the best solution may be to install the old xfree 3.3 drivers. You can download these from slackware -get them from the 9.1 tree in hte /pasture directory. There may be a cirrus driver. Otherwise, use the SVGA driver.
Speaking of SVGA, the 'MiniLin33' distro which I make available uses that, and is a very small installation. You might try that and see if it works. It's very old and uses the 2.0 kernel, but you could use the XF86Config from there, perhaps, to set up the SVGA driver under Amigo-2.0.
You can buy 1-4MB graphics cards from computer recyclers for about $5-10 for a box of 4 or 5 cards.