Hi,

I have a copy of FC4 and Ubuntu and am trying to install them on an old P133 Dell Dimension pc that I got for free today. It has a floppy and cdrom that both work but I can not get it to boot from the cdrom, it says about isolinux, could not find cdrom device.

I have set the bios to boot from cdrom, I have checked the burnt cd's that they are okay, I do not have a network connection for it. I am prepared to download and try other distributions if they will work.

Please I need some advice on how to boot the FC4 or Ubuntu installations with this problem.

Rather than deleting this, I will post the answer in case it helps anyone else in the same situation!

After trying a few different things I finally updated the BIOS from A03 to A05 (available from the Dell website), and it now accepts the CDROMs and boots from them!

Am currently installing Ubuntu

Well done!

Well.. it got to copying across the files from the cd, and then said "killing...", goes black, says "killing..." again and repeats.

FC4 doesnt do much better..

P133 Dell Dimonsion
48mb RAM
2Gb + 8Gb HDD's
CDROM

What distro would work best? I read that Ubuntu was great for old pc's but it isnt liking it... Any other suggestions and links?


P.S: currently running memtest86 on fc4 disk... 81% complete...

FC4 installation displays a lot of lines similar to this final line:

[<c0118bb1>] do_ page_fault+0x1ce/0x5c6

I kept having a similar problem with FC4 - try this:

when you get to the boot screen, type in just any random thing )lakjfd;sjka

hit enter and get an error.

then hit enter again and the install will go fine.

This has worked for several people that I know of - try it out and see if it works for you!

Nah same problem.. just run a disc check and it said Fail too.. and sod downloading another copy heh. Am downloading Slackware atm as it says you only need a 486!

Managed to install a working copy of FC1 last night, but *damn* is it slow. Think I will try slackware instead..

Try running a more lightweight window manager. For example, xfce4.

You might also try running debian. But again, don't run kde, or gnome. That machine doesn't have enough ram to run them well.

I managed to balls up my FC1 install by changing the monitor settings (there were only two settings it *could* be...). So instead I used the SBM floppy to run an install of Slackware.

first install didnt work.. still hung unto fc1 kernal.. not sure what happened there. So am trying to wipe the hdd's completely with a full format and install onto that. Am currently formatting the swap section (1gb) and it's taken FOREVER.

Okay, I need help.

As I said, I had FC1 installed until I changed a monitor setting and couldnt get into the desktop as the monitor would go into standby/flashing mode. So I have tried to install Slackware 7.

I went into the setup and used cfdisk to first delete and then create partitions on both disks, finally writing to them and using Quick format.

hda
Boot (1gb)
Swap (1gb)

hdb
Linux (14gb)

I then installed Slackware on Full mode onto the linux partition and used the kernal in the final options from the CDROM.

Setup completes and I reboot, but STILL it then boots up to that menu asking you to pick a kernal, and the only option is FC1's kernal from the previous installation, despite formatting.

It selects this kernal, as it is the only one, and after some lines of code it stops at:


- mkrootdev : label / not found
- Mounting root filesystem
- mount: error 2 mounting ext3
- pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed : 2
- umount /initrd/proc failed : 2
- Freeing unused kernel memory: 120k freed
- Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

I'm quite new to all this and really dont know what is going on, so any help is greatly appreciated. I thought formatting would have wiped everything.. and where is the kernal picked from the CDROM list of kernals during install??

What can i do?!?

Thanks.........