!@nospam.%#* LINUX! (or, help me!)

James 'Woody' Webster (jrwebste@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au)
Thu, 14 Mar 1996 00:07:15 +1100 (EST)

Howdy all!,

After having contemplated installing Linux on my machine for several
weeks, and seeing Walnut Creek was at the PC Show I purchased their
Slackware Linux v3 CD (maybe not the cheapest option at $40, but
anyway), I have decided to take the plunge.

So far, it has been more of a resounding thud... I have been unable to
get even upto the rootdisk stage of installation!

My system contains an ASUS PCI/I-486SP3 mainboard, with onbard NCR53810
SCSI controller chip - Conner and Quantum harddrives, a Sony CDU-76S _SCSI_
CD-ROM drive, AWE32 soundcard and no-name NE2000 compatible. Also a Diamond
Stealth 32 (which I belive will make Xwindows a bugger to get going).

My problem is this: I boot using the slackware SCSI bootdisk, hit enter
at the BOOT prompt, get a few lines of initialisation info - then
'Calibrating PCI delay loop', after which the system goes into a loop
where pages of hex scroll onto the screen, then a pause, then more pages
of hex, etc, etc (actually there is also some meaning ful text displayed
in addition to this - but it scrolls by too quickly, anyway to stop
this?) - I have left the machine in this state for about twenty minutes
in the hope that maybe 'calibrating PCI delay loop' takes some time...
but the situation was still the same.

I have also tried to boot using a number of other bootdisks, ASCSI,
SCSINET1, SCSINET2, with similar (or worse!, such as 'unable to
identify PCI device') results. I have also removed the sound and network
cards in the hope that they were clashing but this has not achieved
anything. I have yet to remove the CD-ROM from the loop, anyone think
this is a possible solution.

The only other possible solution I can think of is tweaking the BIOS, in
which case, which settings???

At any rate, ALL HELP IS APPRECIATED!

regards,
james w.

| e-mail at jrwebste@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au or woody@nospam.ftoomsh.progsoc.uts.edu.au |
| bloodnet web page at http://ftoomsh.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~woody |