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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] can't boot from older PC

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 12:32:50AM -0400, Howard Eisenberger wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:26:19AM -0400, Carl Heyendal wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to boot a Fedora 10 Live CD from an 'older' PC that I want to 
> > use as a Linux platform, but it just won't detect the CD after a restart.
 
> How old? I have Debian Lenny on a P200 with 64mb ram 

> I just checked and was able to boot into rescue mode using
> the Lenny businesscard netinst iso (RW). I may not have been 
> able to boot the regular netinst iso from testing, but I'd 
> have to re-burn it to check.

The testing netinst CD booted into rescue mode, but the installer
didn't find the IDE hard drive, although it showed up in dmesg 
without any errors and from another console I could see it with
fdisk and turned on the swap partition. Perhaps if I was doing
a fresh install, the partitioner would find the drive.

None of this is much use if the CD doesn't boot at all. With
recent releases I have found that installing to older harware
can be a hit-and-miss affair. For x86 there are hundreds of
versions/distros that one can try and maybe get lucky.

I am having problems with a couple of older Sun (sparc64) boxes,
but there are only a handfull of distros to consider, including
the BSD's.

Regards,

Howard E.