Cant find CDROM problem

[clane]

I have a 486-66mhz PC (1992 or 1993 vintage) that I dug out recently. I am trying to load Knoppix using a floppy. I used rawrite and created the boot floppy. Knoppix goes throught the boot process up until it scans for the CDROM. It cant find the CDROM then drops me into the "very limited shell" mode.

I tried doing a search on this problem, but all of the answers I found didn't really address how to get Knoppix to recognize the CDROM. I know the CDROM works, because I have WIN95 loaded on the HD, and I can read CD's from Windows. Also, I know the Knoppix CD is burned correctly, because I have another PC that is CD-bootable, and this Knoppix CD worked fine on that PC.

I don't really want to copy Knoppix to the HD and boot off the HD, at least not yet. For now I'd like to get it to boot from CD.

[tearinghairout]

My guess is that on a machine that old, the cd drive is not ATAPI, but instead has some proprietry interface.

When CD's first came out, you couldn't just plug them onto an IDE cable, they all came with their own particular interface card, and you always had to install a driver specific to your CD.

Nowadays they are all just another IDE device, and no special drivers are needed. This is the sort that Knoppix will recognize.

[clane]

Mine is connected to a Soundblaster card. I don't remember for sure, but I think it may be a SCSI interface on the soundblaster card....but I may be wrong too.

So, if it isn't connected to the Mobo and isn't ATAPi, it won't work? Am I screwed?

[turbinater]

Am I screwed?
You most certainly are, but don't get angry, people with your condition can still live very happy, normal lives. Judging by the age, you probably want to get as far away from that machine as possible anyways.

If you're planning of scrapping this box, I can give you some good suggestions on how to destroy it.




When CD's first came out, you couldn't just plug them onto an IDE cable, they all came with their own particular interface card

Funny, I don't remimber ever having to plug any cd's into my ide cable; that's where I plugged my cd drive.

[clane]

I'm not angry about. I was just hoping I could get Knoppix loaded just to see how tolerable it was speedwise. the specs say it will run on a 486...I wanted to give it a try.

Actually, I have been fooling around with this PC for a month or so. I got it to run Mandrake 9.0 over a network using LTSP (www.ltsp.org). It's not real fast but, it's functional. I've run Opera, Netscape, OpenOffice, GEdit and a few other apps on it. The fact that it is running MDK9 at all is pretty amazing.

[eyeball2]

No, don't give up on that old hardware just yet; some poor folk could put it to good use, and it could make a great demo machine for the versatility of the OS.
If you've got the drive space, and another machine handy, just copy the iso across a parallel cable peer-to-peer, and boot from that floppy with the fromhd=/dev/hdax (where x is your hd, probably 1) and voila, you've got the poor-man's install. If you've got enough space left after that, and if you've split your drive into another partition (besides a swap partition) you can do an install into the other partition. If you're drive is too small, maybe try a smaller Knopknockoff, like Morphix, or Flonix or DamnSmall. Gotta love those old cables...
I've done just this on an old Toshiba laptop with 40meg ram and a P1-90, 800meg drive, but a 2meg video section. Runs just great!
:shock:

[clane]

Thanks for the tips. I'll give the parallel cable a try. I'm assuming I'll need a Lap-link type cable rather than a standard parallel cable. Also, I currently have Win95 on the HD and it is pretty much used up, but I'm thinking about just wiping it clean. If I can get a decent Linux installation with acceptable speed, it should be light years ahead of Win95 in a lot of ways.

[nflict]

Dont be so quick to give up. I dont know crap about linux, but i have the same situation as you. I found/dug up an old Compaq Prolinea MT CDS which consists of a 486 processor, 20MB ram, and a Soundblaster 16/SCSI ISA card. Unfortunately for me, the machine doesnt have a hard drive, and the BIOS wont support anything larger than a gig or so. Also, the bios cant be accessed without some files that get stored on your hard drive (i have no hard drive). So my only choice besides DOS on floppy disks was to go ahead and try knoppix in text mode.

First I wanted to test the SCSI cd drive (Model CR-503-B) to see if it even worked...so i dropped in the knoppix 3.3 cd (which works on all my other machines) and made a dos bootdisk using Bart's Modular Boot Disk MODBOOT 2.7 and used the ASPI manager aspi2dos (AIC-6260/6360/6370 v3.68). it detects the drive just fine with that and i can browse the knoppix cd with this driver. By the way, on my soundblaster/scsi card it says Adaptec AIC-6360L on the controller chip. So now i know which controller I have, and with some research on various places I found linux sees my card as the AHA-152x. I have tried loading knoppix with the 'expert' command and tried loading this driver, but it never works. I always end up at the 'very limited shell'. I found this note regarding my controller card:

"Note: You cannot boot from the SoundBlaster cards as
they have no on-board BIOS, which is necessary for
mapping the boot device into the system BIOS I/O
vectors. They are perfectly usable for external
tapes, CDROMs, etc, however. The same goes for
any other AIC-6x60 based card without a boot ROM.
Some systems DO have a boot ROM, which is generally
indicated by some sort of message when the system is
first powered up or reset. Check your system/board
documentation for more details."
(http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gendalia/FAQ/old.complete.faq)

I believe you can actually load knoppix just fine using a boot disk. I used knoppix's boot disk maker and knoppix loads up to the point where it needs to find the SCSI cd drive to load from. I am quite sure this can be worked out, but I think i need a more precise 'module' than the one knoppix has pretaining to my drive. Knoppix has quite a few SCSI modules, but the only one that should work (and i've tried all of them) is aha152x.o but it doesnt work. When I try aha1542.o it sits for a little while (5 seconds or so) trying to look for the drive.

I know im headed the right direction on this, anyone got any advice or ideas? I'm really thinking i can make this old beast actually work :p

-nflict