grub not mounting IDE drive on old computer
 

I'm trying to install Debian (without desktop) on and old Packard Bell amd-133MHz computer. 80 MB ram, 40GB disk.

The furthest I get is initramfs. dmesg reports:

piix 0000:00:07.0: IDE controler (0x8086:0x122e rev 0x02)
pixx 0000:00:07.0: IDE port disabled
pixx 0000:00:07.0: IDE port disabled
PIIX_IDE: probe of 0000:00:07.0 failed with error -12

I suspect this is the center of my problem. Does anyone know what the error code is or why the IDE port is being disabled before the probe?

I've tried google searches for the piix ide error codes but cannot find them.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I did google for "PIIX_IDE debian ide port disabled" and found a few bug reports (some old) like this one http://lists.debian.org/debian-kerne.../msg00816.html. Here's the search I did on Google

What were you planning to do with the PC? It is rather spec challenged for this day and age :)

Actually, I just wanted to get some old DOS games - my regular computer doesn't have a 3.5" floppy. I thought it would be easier to install linux on the old system (I even found an old usb port board that is recognized by linux).

If I could get linux to install, then I could copy the floppies to a usb stick and then I could trash the computer.

Further investigation: it seems the system when booting is looking for the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files to load.

I had to manually invoke loadlin because the computer doesn't seem to want to boot CDs.

what version of debian did you use?

check out this page http://distrowatch.com/search.php >> from "Distribution Category" choose "old computers"
good luck

Hi

I had an old pc only 32 meg ram I could run DSLinux on it that recognized floppy and usb.
It is old/out dated but did get pc to run also has ssh if any help.

It dosn't support ext4 file system

I tried the latest 6.06 debian.

I've just gotten dsl to install on the thing, so I guess I'm on my way.

Thanks everyone!

Hi

You can run ds from disk as live cd