Nigel Henry wrote:
On Thursday 25 October 2007 01:23, John Summerfield wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote:
This is not directly Fedora related.
I connect to the Internet through my Smoothwall, and a serial modem. Recently the machine that the Smoothwall is running on has been playing up. Harddrive spinning up and down. I have another older machine (1.33GHz, 64MB RAM, and 6GB harddrive) which had Win 2000 pro on it, and was trying to install a backup Smoothwall on it. The Smoothwall installs ok, and lilo is installed, but when I reboot the BIOS does the memory check, and all I get next is half a screenfull of "40's" printed out. they remain for a few seconds, then I just get a prompt that I can't do anything with.
I am wondering if something has been left behind on the harddrive from the Win 2000 install, that linux has not been able to remove.
Almost certainly that is not the problem,
You need to read the lilo documentation, it will probably explain to you exactly what is wrong.
Cheers John
Thanks to Andy for the dd syntax, but sadly, although it cleared the start of the drive, I still couldn't get the Smoothwall to boot up post install, just an "L" followed by a string of 40's after the BIOS memory check. All a bit
As I said.
weird, as when I bought the machine about 4 years ago when I first started with computers, it had Win 98 on it, and that worked ok. I passed the machine onto my son, and he somehow got Win 2000 pro installed on it. I know that was booting ok, because I tried it. It got as far as wanting the password to get in, but as I don't know his password I couldn't progress further, but at least it was booting, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with booting from the harddrive.
Could a failing cmos battery cause this sort of problem? I cycled down to town today, but forgot to buy a new one.
John. Lilo is possibly the problem, but I can't see how to re-install it in the MBR. Saying that though, on the other machine where the Smoothwall is working ok, there is no problem, and I couldn't be posting this if lilo was screwed up.
I don't care whether the other machine works, it's irrelevant.
Read the freaking documentation.