Dear Community,

Recently, I have been given a Pentium 100 with 32 MB of RAM and 2 hard disks (about 1.2 GB together). Since the BIOS is old (1992), it can't boot from a cdrom device so I used rawrite (with Windows XP, using my REAL computer) to create a Fedora Core 1 bootdisk to be able to boot from the floppy.

Once I booted it with my diskette, I would like to be able to install Linux from my Fedora CDs. The thing is that when I choose local CDROM as my installation media, it says: Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type. Would you like to manually select your driver or use a driver disk?

The problem seems to come from the BIOS cause when Fedora uncompresses, when the diskette starts, one of the messages I get is:

PIIXb: neither IDE ports enabled (BIOS)

And then, a couple of lines below:

hdd: no response (status = 0x80), resetting drive
hdd: no response (status = 0x90), resetting drive

Also, when I enter the BIOS setup, I see that primary and secondary IDE slaves are not installed, while primary and secondary masters are connected to my two hard disks.

I tried booting the computer with a DOS (Win 98) boot diskette. Even then, it didn't see my cdrom device (I even installed the driver for that particular device: Lite-On Ltn-242).

It's been a week now since I started messing with that problem and I think I came to the point where some help is needed!!

Thank you all!

BTW: I am new to Linux and I don't know much about hardware, though I am learning!

Your best bet, if the BIOS has trouble with the drives, si to read through the BIOS setup screen and find out if the IDE controllers can be enabled/disabled. I doubt it on that machine. If you have the detection set to "auto" and the drives aren't being "found", you may have luck by entering the settings manually. Usually the cylenders,sectors,heads stuff is written on the label on the drive. If you can't find that, google for your drives and see if you can find a spec sheet that tells you what you want to know. I had to do that with a couple of old ~500mb Fujitsu drives because the jumpers weren't labeled. Took a bit to find the drives online, but I got an actual spec sheet to refer to. Once you enter the manual specs, your puter should see the drives (got my fingers crossed for you)

Tank you for your help and sorry for the delay, I was (and I still am) very busy with my work!

I borrowed a cdrom drive from school (LG 52X) and my BIOS detected it at first time! So apparently my problem was the other cdrom drive (Lite-on LTN-242, 24X). After that, I tried a couple of times to install Fedora but the further I went with the installation is when it installs the packages. Then it froze and I got this message (in the journal: F3 key):

<4>spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ 7

So I decided that maybe Fedora Core 1 is too big for my 32MB RAM and my 1.2 GB of Hard disk.

I am now trying with Debian (Woody).

carbono, on that machine, you might want to install Woody with the latest 2.2 kernel instead of the 2.4 Its less memory intensive and you'll get a more responsive machine out of the deal. Good luck.

Where could I find a woody with kernel 2.2, that I could either:

-install from floppies (is it possible with only one floppy drive?) or;

-boot the installation from a floppy (rescue disk?) but install from a cdrom (I downloaded the woody CDROM last week but I cannot boot from a cdrom since my BIOS is too old)?

Thanks!

Smart Boot Manager will allow you to boot from the CD (after you boot from its floppy).