therian
August 12th, 2008, 07:45 AM
I have a Compaq Deskpro EN P3 733 mhz
with 384 meg of ram, and 40 G Western Digital hard drive
(set as master on primary ide/DVD-cdrom NEC 3550 is slave)
It won't load linux (ubuntu or SuSE) onto the hard drive for love or money.
I used a win98SE floppy and fdisk'd the hard drive. Created Primary Dos Partition, the whole disc. Next I did an fdisk /mbr to put a boot block out there. When I boot to the hard drive, it tells me there is no os. Which if it tells me that much, I know the MBR is there, and it's working. Here's the problem.
I've played with the APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) settings. Disabling it, would have forced the machine into legacy mode.
Anyway I don't think that's the problem. Ubuntu just goes into a reboot loop. It comes up, looks around and reboots. APIC or NOAPIC.
SuSE otoh, gets far enough along to tell me it can't find the hard drive? Huh? I can alway get that message there is no operating system on the hard drive - so I know the MBR is there. I don't want to
install "over the top" of windows, I want to make windows go away and install it 100% linux. But everything I've tried fails.
One thing I DID do, is I update the BIOS as well. Well. I had a Version 2 bios, it now has a version 3 bios (latest and greatest). Umm the latest BIOS is still over 6 years old!
What's the trick? Is this machine so old, that windows is all it will ever run? If so, maybe I ought to just donate to some school. It DID have WINDOWS XP running on it, when I got it. And that seemed fine.
I also ran the built in disc diagnostics, and that ran clean.
Wayno G.
with 384 meg of ram, and 40 G Western Digital hard drive
(set as master on primary ide/DVD-cdrom NEC 3550 is slave)
It won't load linux (ubuntu or SuSE) onto the hard drive for love or money.
I used a win98SE floppy and fdisk'd the hard drive. Created Primary Dos Partition, the whole disc. Next I did an fdisk /mbr to put a boot block out there. When I boot to the hard drive, it tells me there is no os. Which if it tells me that much, I know the MBR is there, and it's working. Here's the problem.
I've played with the APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) settings. Disabling it, would have forced the machine into legacy mode.
Anyway I don't think that's the problem. Ubuntu just goes into a reboot loop. It comes up, looks around and reboots. APIC or NOAPIC.
SuSE otoh, gets far enough along to tell me it can't find the hard drive? Huh? I can alway get that message there is no operating system on the hard drive - so I know the MBR is there. I don't want to
install "over the top" of windows, I want to make windows go away and install it 100% linux. But everything I've tried fails.
One thing I DID do, is I update the BIOS as well. Well. I had a Version 2 bios, it now has a version 3 bios (latest and greatest). Umm the latest BIOS is still over 6 years old!
What's the trick? Is this machine so old, that windows is all it will ever run? If so, maybe I ought to just donate to some school. It DID have WINDOWS XP running on it, when I got it. And that seemed fine.
I also ran the built in disc diagnostics, and that ran clean.
Wayno G.