Rob carlson on Mon, 9 Dec 2002 12:20:07 -0500


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[PLUG] Does this sound like a lemon?


Forgive the length here...

I recently (yesterday) purchased a cheap system for home (a SD11 Via 
motherboard with an Athlon 750 processor  AmiBios, 20gb WD IDE HD) and 
the behavior has been to say the least suspect.  It came with WinMe on 
it and the first thing I set out to do was to fdisk the entire drive by 
booting up my Slackware 8.1 CD.  It got to the booting CD, looking for 
boot sector message and hung.  After making sure all BIOS settings were 
ok, I tried a Suse disk.  and it booted into the install perfectly.

OK, after reading the Slackware FAQ I  found that since the iso doesn't 
have a bootable floppy image on it, that certain BIOSes may not 
recognize it. ( I verified that my  BIOS was current).  I resigned 
myself to making the boot disk and all the root disks (since I am 
pretty attached to Slackware) and proceeded with the install.  All went 
ok, fdisk and all the packages-- until it tried to install lilo.  It 
said there was a problem and to install lilo manually.  So I booted 
from the floppy and all was there, and tried to run lilo.  It 
said "/boot/boot.b" could not be found.  I looked in the /boot 
directory and the vmlinuz and the system map were there, but no 
boot.b.  There was however a boot.bmp.b and a boot-message.b and 
another boot-xxx.b file.

Here's where it gets weird...  Also in that directory were command.com, 
io.sys, a progra~1 directory, and a windows directory (along with a few 
other non linux files).   I tried to delete the windows stuff and it 
said read only file system canot delete.  Odd (keep in mind I fdisked 
and did quick formats on all drives)  Out of curiosity I booted to the 
HD.  Up came Windows ME...I decided to take another tack and booted up 
a suse cd rescue disk and removed the /boot partition (/dev/hda1) wrote 
the table, then added it back and re-wrote the table.  I then booted up 
with the floppy again.  Lo and behold, no boot partition, but the 
windows crap was now in root...

Grrrrr....  I then decided to get a windows floppy, did a win95 fdisk, 
removed all the partitions, and booted the HD again.  OK, no WinMe.  I 
reinstalled with the Slack boot and root floppies (still had the lilo 
issue) and lilo still doesn't work.  Further, the windows crap is back 
in the boot directory.  How could this happen?  (The disks were made by 
rawrite on an  XP box, btw)

Further, I'm getting hostname kernel: hda: dma-intr status=0x51 { 
DriveReady SeekCompleteError }
hostname kernel: hda: dma-intr status=0x84 { DriveStatusErrror  
BadCRC}  
in syslog unless I turn of DMA with hdparm.  I googled and found this 
could be due to cabling or a bad HD.  I welcome any thoughts on those 
errors (keeping in mind the above behavior)

Lastly, I'm getting FAT errors in dmesg 
FAT Bogus LogicalSector size 0
FAT: Did not find valid FSINFO signature
Directory 1 bad FAT (Along with File system Panic)

So, did I get a lemon, or am I missing something obvious...

Thanks for any help.

Rob Carlson  


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