|
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
|
[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, Network & Systems Administrator
Kitchen & Associates Architectural Services, PA
Architecture - Planning - Interior Design
856.854.1880
_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
|
|