I am in trouble. I have an old Gateway P5-60 (60mhz pentium, 48mb ram) that had a 500mb hard drive with windows 95. I want to install linux so I can use the machine as a server. I put in a 20gb hard drive that I had, made a slackware boot floppy, tried to start it up, and failed. The floppy drive light flashed but it apparently didn't read the disk because nothing happened. A debian rescue floppy did the same thing. An MS-Dos boot disk; same thing. Is there any way to save this machine?

One thing I've thought of would be to put the hard drive in my working computer, install slackware or debian on that, and then put the hard drive back in the old computer. Does this have any merit? I can't think of anything else.

Any help, even if it's "forget about it, there's no way you'll be able to get that computer working" would be appreciated, though I really want to hope that there's a way.

Thank you,
Lila

Oh, and I forgot to add, I can't seem to get into the BIOS setup. When I hit F1, like it says to do during the memory check, nothing happens. I get the please wait message and I'm stuck there with nothing.
-Lila

Try pulling out the hard drive and see if you can boot off the floppy drive or get into your bios setup. I doubt that a machine of that vintage can handle a 20GB hard drive and it may be locking the whole thing up. Once you get into your bios setup, make sure you have the boot order set with floppy first then hard drive.

It can work.
I moved a hard drive from a Pentium PC without a working CDROM to a Pentium with a working CDROM for a Debian install and had sucess. It has been running for about a year and a half now.
Thinking that would always work, I installed Suse on a Celeron and moved the drive to a Pentium. It would not boot. I am not sure why. Possibly it autodetected too much and fails when things are not as it thinks they should be. With Debian I was able to delay the little configuration needed until I moved the drive.
kilgoretrout is right. There is no chance that computer wants to use a 20GB drive.
I overcame the drive size limits on my old Pentiums with an ISA Y2K/large drive card.
You may want to see if the floppy is any good.
I have one Pentium I was using as a server that became so flakey I could not do an install. All it had was a floppy and I would do network installs. I am assuming it is the mainboard as changing out the floppy does not help.
There are lots of thing to try. At some point old PCs become garbage though.

After some fighting I was able to get the computer to boot from a floppy if I started it without the floppy, entered the bios, exited the bios, and then put in the floppy. I used Smart Boot Manager to boot a slackware cd, and lo and behold, fdisk can't open /dev/hda. So I enter the drive size into the bios, and if I let the computer boot on its own it detects the drive but of course doesn't do anything more because the drive is empty. Fdisk still doesn't work. Would it be possible to partition the drive on my working computer and then go directly to the slackware setup program? I have a feeling that if fdisk isn't seeing the drive now it won't see the partitions then.

Thanks for the answers, they confirmed my suspicions that this drive is just too big. Maybe I should just buy a smaller drive. That Y2K/large drive card looks nifty too.

I have had success using something like Seagate's DiscWizard to enable an old machine to use a large drive. Western Digital also has a utility that has worked for me in the past. It might be possible to use one of those utilities in your case. (BTW, the brand of the drive doesn't matter for one of those utilities, but I don't remember which.)

And here is another thought: Why don't you 'borrow' a CDROM from a machine so that you can do the install? Wouldn't that be easier than moving the HD?

The machine has a CDROM. I just can't boot from it, I guess the bios is too old. I'll have to look into those utilities, thanks for mentioning them. The drive is a Western Digital, so perhaps there's hope.
Lila