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ions
01-18-2005, 09:49 PM
It was bought at one of those PC sales held in hotel conference rooms. The guy it was bought from does them all and can be tracked down. Hopefully it needn't come to that.

It came with Windows 98 pre-installed. CDROM but no floppy. Seperate PCMCIA cards were bought. 1 3com NIC and a interface for a HP burner. Windows sees the cards but doesn't play nice with them. It complains there's an error with the drivers. So without it communicating with the NIC there was no network or CD burner for it to back things up to. Whatever it would be used for would be stuck on there.

I thought 'Linux to the rescue'.

Tried Gnoppix. No work. Kernel panic: Attmepted to kill init! Ubuntu, same. Gentoo, same. Init fails. So I tried Knoppix. Fails too. Tried Knoppix booting failsafe. Errors do occur. Mostly crying about hdc but eventually, and I do mean after a long freaking while, it does boot into a KDE desktop. Not a working one though. The CDROM endlessly tries accessing something but all I have on the screen is 6 icons. No KDE panels or anything like that. The lights in the dongle for the 3COM card don't light up at all.

Any suggestions on things to try before $ is spent or I try and track down the dude it was bought from?
bsm2001
01-18-2005, 10:08 PM
Have you tried DSL? that is very light weight and might help you get system info and all.
ions
01-18-2005, 10:09 PM
Originally posted by bsm2001
Have you tried DSL? that is very light weight and might help you get system info and all.

Heading to distrowatch to get it now.
welmers
01-18-2005, 10:24 PM
Could you provide some more information about the thing, like memory, CPU and harddisk space?

I have installed Debian Woody on a ThinkPad 365X (P100 40MB Ram 700MB HD) and it works quite well with WindowMaker and other light-weight apps.
ions
01-18-2005, 10:33 PM
Well...I'm not sure how relevent the system specs are really but the 770 is ahead of the 365. It's a PII with 160MB RAM.
gehidore
01-18-2005, 10:47 PM
I would try out DSL but see if you can boot to the memtest86 option first (if they still have it)
ions
01-18-2005, 11:07 PM
DSL no likey. The little splash screen comes up and then it says failed to boot. Pressing enter or F2 leads to:

Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue
ions
01-19-2005, 08:27 PM
No other ideas? :(
gehidore
01-19-2005, 08:57 PM
Is the cdrom you are booting from built in? or is it part of some "add on device"?
Does the laptop have USB? If it does try booting from the usb DSL (if you have a usb drive)
je_fro
01-20-2005, 02:35 AM
I'd see if memtest86 is on the latest gentoo minimal cd
ions
01-20-2005, 11:46 PM
I've tried running memtest with Gnoppix, Ubuntu & DSL and it errors before it even starts. I'll try it with a Gentoo minimal though just to see.

gehidore, usb is my next step. First I have to make sure it's working then I gotta see how much I can do with that.
welmers
01-25-2005, 07:24 PM
Sounds like the CDROM drive is defective. Perhaps the lens need to be cleaned?
But it can also be something else of course.
PII with 160MB ram sounds like a pretty good thing. A part of my daily work is done with laptop like that. So searching what's wrong is worth it I think.

Maybe it's an idea to take out the harddisk, connect it via a 2,5"->3,5" IDE adaptor to another computer and install software on the disk on this way.

I've had a similar laptop, that crashed all the time due to mechanical vibrations. Even typing too hard caused the computer to hang. I disassambled it completely, and found the cause in the main board, something like copper lines on the pcb was broken. Luckily I found another main board, for free...
However, it took me almost a year before I had a stable working laptop.
ions
01-25-2005, 10:37 PM
memtest is running on it right now as I type this and so far no errors.

Welmers I agree, this machine is certainly worth the fight to get working. It's clean and the screen is still very vibrant. USB works well and it's responsive enough in Win98.

Haven't thought of cleaning the lens on the drive....
gehidore
01-26-2005, 01:46 AM
Originally posted by ions
memtest is running on it right now as I type this and so far no errors.

Welmers I agree, this machine is certainly worth the fight to get working. It's clean and the screen is still very vibrant. USB works well and it's responsive enough in Win98.

Haven't thought of cleaning the lens on the drive....
I look forward to seeing an update :D ( a good update )