[techtalk] Help with setting up a Linux box

[Michelle Dukich]

Dear List:

I have been having so much fun programming in perl using emacs that I just cant stand for
my day to end so I wanted to have a Linux box at home with which I could extend my work
day and provide a convenient excuse to ignore my lovely familly.  My office gave me an
old HP Vectra VL (P2 at 233mHz, 64mb ram) which allegedly booted under NT.  

The cd drive (Pioneer dr-a24x) is not bootable so I created a RH7.1 install floppy,
popped it in and booted.  Linux boots, sees the hard disc and the cd rom, prints "running
install" then hangs at /sbin/loader.  

Being a perl gal, TMOWTDI, so I dug up a Mandrake 7.2 set I had around, created a boot
disc and tried again.  This time it gets to second stage install, and hangs while it says
"initializing cd rom". 

One more try, I had a hard disc that I put RH5.2 on about a year and a half ago so I put
it into this box and tried to boot from it.  It boots but then says one partition was not
unmounted cleanly and it hangs while doing fsck on that partion.  More precisely, it says
"irq timeout, status 0x58, disabled dma, ide0:reset:success, kernel panic: freelist
empty.  

Any ideas?

Will this machine live again happily to match sexps and munge data?  Thanks in advance.  



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