I have an old compaq deskpro en 750 that I am trying to run a minimal linux distro on. I have tried several, most recently sparkylinux minimal cli only 4.9.

THe machine will boot from c: to dos 6.2 no problem but when I try a linux version booting via grub, I invariably get a recurring chain of drdy err warnings and no boot.

What am I missing?

I have an old Compaq Pro, running a full install of Slackware 14.1, 32 bit.

Some questions.

1. Which ISO did you install? I looked at Sparky downloads 4.9. Stable, Rolling, or Development. And 32 bit or 64 bit?

2. Do you still have a Dos partition that still boots? I'm assuming yes, however, is it booting from grub?

3. I wouldn't expect you need to chain load a linux system. Did you install to free space? Did you create a new partition? Did you format it with a linux file system?

4. What CPU chip do you have?

Possibly we can help once we have some details.

I used this .iso:

SparkyLinux 4.9 MinimalCLI (no codecs, no X Server)

sparkylinux-4.9-i686-minimalcli.iso

I wasn't trying to preserve the dos bootability and don't consider it essential but when I wrote off the sparkylinux install and went back to fdisk (by booting from a floppy), the dos partition still seemed to be there but needed a format 'c: /s' to actually be bootable. This surprised me as I thought I'd told the linux installer to clobber it.

Thanks for your interest.

Brian H.

i686 is a 32 bit ISO system, which should work on an older system.

How big is the hard drive?

In linux, we know the drives as sda, for the first drive, and sdb for the second drive. C: is dos and windows.

The general approach is to delete old partitions you no longer need, create new ones, and format them. I am not familiar with Sparky, or Debain based distros, and their installers.

You can display old partitions, delete them and create new ones with fdisk. Some installers allow this as well. Some create the partitions by some default, which may, or may not make sense for the disk(s) involved.

My old Compac Pro has a 10 gig disk. I added a second disk ( IDE only on this old hardware ). I have the root file system on the 10 gig disk, /home and swap on the second disk.

If your drive is 10 gig, you will have to create a swap partition, and leave the rest as root and /home. If the drive is smaller, you should have a look at the Sparky doc to see what the minimum is for a install. You may not have enough room.