Ok this probably isent the right mgs board to post this on but it involves linux sort of well not yet but ok when i boot my old 386 labtop it comes up and says fixed disk configuration error??? but i wanted to know is ther a program that i can KILL MY HARD DRIVE WITH??? hehe

This sounds like it might be a bios problem more than an operating system problem. I may be wrong, however. If you can boot from a rescue floppy of some sort (Tom's is good), then you could try blanking everything with fdisk.

ok that didnt work same thing came up i tryed win 95 boot disk i tried win 98 se boot disk and nothing i dunno what to do?? there must be something that i can just put in the floppy drive and that will wipe the whole hard drive???

If none of your floppies are having any effect, then perhaps it is a BIOS problem after all? Would it be possible to get hold of a different harddrive? If so, you could perhaps eliminate or confirm the BIOS position. Alternatively, you could try accessing this harddrive from another machine... ie if this is an IDE harddrive, and you happen to have a spare IDE channel going on your main computer, then you could connect it up and check it out from the comfort of another, working computer. If the harddisk checks out then, then it starts to look ever more likely to be a bios fault. If the harddrive does not work in you main computer, perhaps you could fix it from there? There are any number of possibilities!

ok i tried that i have a 2 gb hd from my main comp the pins r diff size so i dunno the BIOS has like nothing in it theres like it tells me when on the system but thats it when i got to move like the arrows it just exits its like push any key to exit so i dunno what i could be i belive that like a few years ago it still wasnt working but i found a way around it with a floppy but im not sure what floppy it was ???

Thymox, I think you've jumped the gun a bit. If the floppies don't boot are they even being read (does the drive light flash and the drive whir into life)? If not it's most likely the boot sequence in the BIOS isn't set for booting from A: (ie first floppy /dev/fd0 if you like).

There'll be a key to press to get into the BIOS setup, eg F1, [del], then look for the boot sequence option. What laptop is this?

If set to boot from floppy and none of your boot disks work ... it's definitely a hardware problem (assuming your discs aren't _all_ mangled).

I'm definitely no expert BTW.

pbhj

ya the light comes on and it makes noise so the floppy drive must be working eh? And ya i kinda think its the Hard Drive Because i took out the Hard Drive just for kicks and I still got the same error so im thinking that its not reading the Hard Drive. What do you guys think???

I think the BIOS thinks a different hard drive is in your machine than is really there. What does the BIOS setup say? (Have you gotten into it yet?)

With the hard drive out, try setting the BIOS settings for any hard drives to "none". That should at least fix the error when you boot floppies. With most BIOS's I've used, if you wait long enough the BIOS boot loader will eventually time out (after several minutes!) and proceed to boot from the floppy anyway. What brand of BIOS does this computer have anyway? What brand and model of computer is it?

What size hard drive are you trying to use? Remember that back in the '386 days, most computers did not have BIOS support for any drive with over 1024 cylinders which was about a 540mb hard drive. This doesn't mean that you can't use a bigger drive, but it means you have to be creative about it. You usually have to do something like tell the BIOS that it is a 1024x16x64 geometry, then put any partitions that you wish to boot on have to be within these limits. For example, for Linux, I put about a 5 meg partition there and configure it to be my "/boot" branch in my directory tree and put my kernel in there. After the kernel boots, it sees the drive as it really is and thus can mount your root file system, including the "/boot" branch just fine. See the "lilo" docs for more on this.

You also might check the docs on the drive itself. There might be some kind of vintage BIOS or DOS compatibility jumper settings on it that might help, but hopefully won't limit the drive size as seen by modern OS's after they boot up.

Oh and to answer the question about erasing the drive:

Way #1) As long as the drive is over 200mb in size or so (and thus uses translation instead of direct physical mapping) you can use any low level formatters that might be in the BIOS of the computer, or any other computer you can put the drive into.

Way #2) If you can get a computer to boot something like "Tomsbtrt" single floppy linux, you can do a command like "dd if=somefile of=/dev/hda" and wipe out track zero on the hard drive where there might be a boot sector virus, or the wrong disk geometry stored. I don't know how to make something like "dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda count=4.3M" work. I even tried the conv=sync option to pad everything out. Does anyone know how to simple write nul's to a device fifo using tools available in tomsbtrt?

Way #3) Boot on an MSDOS floppy and do an fdisk /mbr. This won't wipe the disk, but it will attempt to write a proper master boot record which is where any problems would be anyway.

Ok its a Primax model NB2SX. The BIOS i think doesnt know anything hehe like even when the hard drive is out it says its on. I cant change anything like at the bottom it says Press any key to exit. I think its 100mb And it reads the floppy like the light comes on and it makes noise. So i think its probably the Hard Drive it self. There isent a boot loader on there that i know of. ill try that sigle flopy linux and see if that works thanx alot.

This is expected behavior from older BIOS's. They don't autodetect drives. Therefore if you somehow have the wrong drive settings, the computer won't boot on it.

Hmmm. I wonder what kind of BIOS this is. I can't believe you can't change it, but maybe there is a trick to it. Perhaps a separate floppy disk based utility. You could probably try one of those generic CMOS setting programs that have been floating around the shareware/freeware archives for years now.

If you get it to boot, check out the kernel bootup messages. It will properly identify the hard drive geometry so you'll know what to actually put in the BIOS. (Unless there are over 1024 cylinders, then just get the model number from the kernel messages and go to the manufacturer's website and look up "alternative drive translations" for the drive to find one the will work for you BIOS.) In fact, you should be able to get the Linux floppy to mount the drive and even use it normally. You can test to see if it really is a good drive or not this way before proceeding further. Good GNU/Linux commands to know about for this are "fdisk", "mount", "badblocks", "mkfs", etc.

Good luck, and remember it can take several minutes for the hard drive controller to timeout and pass the booting off to the floppy drive. After you get the "HD error" message, you often have to push a key to get the process to procedure further, try some. The Windows boot floppy should have worked too, but when it does, it won't tell you nearly as much about your computer and often not as correctly as the Tomsbtrt floppy will.

Ok well that single floppy linux thing didnt work. I got the same damn error. OK well i was looking at it and at the top of the BIOS screen it says Phoenix v1.0?? and thats it. Also at the bottom it says "F3 Push_button" so i pushed F3 and it came up and said a few things then i said Left_Ctrl-Push_button:BIOS setup. i would like to know how to get into that if possible because im hoping thats way into the computer hehe. Ill check out a freeware site i know a few Thanx alot

It's also quite possible that the battery that keeps your CMOS RAM alive has died in the years since 386 machines were sold. If that's what has happened, no changes that you make will stick! The only solution for such a situation is to replace the battery, and that may require taking the entire machine apart to get to it. The most practical solution is to search around for another old machine that still has a usable CMOS battery, and buy it!

I have a Toshiba 2650, which is newer than 386 vintage (it's a 486 with 500-MB drive and 4 MB of RAM), and its CMOS battery is pretty well shot. However I can plug it into AC, let it sit for a couple of hours, then power up and go into the BIOS setup routines to re-set the disk parameters. They will then stay set until I turn the system off, but won't survive powering down. I don't even try to use it any more...

You are on the right track. Do the Left_Ctrl (are you sure there isn't another button in combination with it?) thing and get into the BIOS setup.

What I usually end up doing when I'm in your situation at this point is set the 1st hard drive type to "none" so that it won't even attempt to see the hard drive until I know what the correct parameters are. If by some chance there is some kind of "hard drive autodetect" feature, you might try this instead. If the BIOS has a "boot order" setting, make sure the floppy drive is selected as the first device. I don't believe Phoenix was providing this option on '386 vintage BIOS's. Then after you save these settings, the computer should boot directly to floppy.

This is where you can boot from a floppy and run what ever software you wish to figure out what kind of hard drive you have, and whether or not it works. Alternatively you can pull the hard drive out for inspection and find out the parameters this way, they are often written on the drive, otherwise consult the manufacturer's website. After you determine all of this, enter the correct hard drive "type" or geometry in the BIOS settings and things should work.

Another thing to try is an "F9" once inside the BIOS setup screen, which might return BIOS to it's factory settings.

PS: I hate Phoenix BIOS myself. But I've always gotten it to work for me given enough effort.

Ok, here's a step by step solution. I had this exact problem.

1. Boot the laptop. But don't touch it. Make sure you boot it while it's plugged in.

2. Un-plug it. Close the top. Think of the highest building that you can find.

3. Go to that building.

4. Go all the way up to the roof (I've found that the extra altitude sems to help correct the problem).

5. Open the top of the laptop, and look at the screen. Try to take a mental image.

6. Now imagine, in your head, typing "format c:", and having it appear off the screen.

7. Open your eyes. Now, you're going to do the same thing that you imagined, except that instead of typing "format c:", you say "format this, you piece of shit", and hurl the laptop off the side of the building. Now you have sucessfully prepared the laptop for step 8.

8. Go down to the street, pick up the pieces, and throw them in a trash can.

I know that solved my problem, if you need any help just PM me.

Since Matt3333 hasn't been heard of in almost 2 weeks, maybe he did get/give the 386 laptop to boot from a tall building as you suggested.

Of course an old thing like that would have made a decent dialup PPP NAT router/caching DNS server & www proxy server assumming you can put an ethernet card in on it. (probably an old parallel port one, but that would work fine for dial-up PPP)