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Hello fellow PLUGgers !
On a related matter: The vendor-supplied boot floppy stopped
functioning in my Linux PC, as in "boot failed." Also would
not mount - nor would a straight-from-the-box DOS-formatted
floppy. So I created a new boot floppy with the commands:
cd /lib/modules
mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 2.4.13-ac6
and that did the trick - detected the CD-R/W drive on reboot
and fixed things so that a new floppy can be mounted OK. [It
still can't recognize the CD-R/W drive when booted from the
hard drive, though.] I even copied a file from the hard drive
to the new floppy.
Except that in the meantime, my W95 PC's floppy drive has
gone south. Sheesh. So my only file transfer mechanism is
to E-mail the file to myself. That's tedious and not very
secure. So in desperation I thought of the following
arrangement:
Get a minimal PC, one with two IDE ports; add another IDE
card, raising the capacity to six IDE (or EIDE ?) hard
drives. Yank all the drives out of the present machines
(four, ca. 4GB, one 40GB and one new 80GB) and install
them in the minimal PC. Add a good quality Ethernet card.
Install Linux Mandrake on the 80GB drive as the boot
drive (along with a 3-1/2 inch floppy, of course). No
CD-R/W drive. No modem. Mount all the partitions that
presently exist on those legacy hard drives.
Get a brand-new Windows box with CD-R/W, floppy, modem,
large hard drive, and Ethernet card. All preinstalled
by a competent vendor who guarantees a working system.
Change _nothing_ in this new PC. No new software, except
that I install a couple of printers that I switch manually.
Now, connect to the minimal PC via Fast Ethernet. Add
CodeWeavers Office to the minimal PC which is running
Linux Mandrake. I should then have access to all my data
files, choice between the Windows version of MS Word and
the Word 97 presently on one of the old hard drives, and
the ability to move large files onto the Windows machine
with its working CD-R/W drive for archiving and transport
to clients.
This is kinda what I was expecting to do with the Linux PC,
except that its vendor apparently copied another hard
drive's contents into the Linux PC's hard drive and forgot
to configure the CD-R/W drive, Netscape, etc. so that I have
now been struggling for the last five weeks without much
success. He has yet to respond to my three pleas for help.
Am I missing something here ?
Best regards,
George Langford
amenex@amenex.com
http://www.amenex.com/
http://www.georgesbasement.com/
______________________________________________________________________
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