Old AST PC pentium 100 with SCSI CD-Writer:Fail to boot.

**crackjap** · 05-09-2003, 03:37 AM

Hi,

First of all, I am newcomer to Linux. I need any help. Thanks.

I have a very old PC: AST Pentium 100 with a SCSI CDR-Writer Ricoh MP6200S. The SCSI adapter is AC520 of Advanced Core Inc.

I tried to use Knoppix on this old PC. I first made a boot floppy diskette. After I put the boot diskette into the floppy drive and Knoppix CD into the CDRW, I powered on the machine. The boot diskette boot the system, but it failed to mount the CD file system since it can not find the CDRW and the system prompt for the device driver module for the SCSI card. Since I do not have one, I told it to autoprobe,but failed. After that the system booted with a very limited one.

Would anyone give me some advice?

Windows 98 can be installed on the PC successfully. So I am certain Knoppix will also be installed. On Windows, the SCSI card is identified as AHA 150x/1510/152x/AIC 6xx.

Thanks for any help!

crackjap

**RockMumbles** · 05-09-2003, 03:06 PM

I looks like the module you'll use is the aha152x, I have some old ISA adaptec cards with that chip, I can't get knoppix 3.1 to recognize them (I haven't tried knoppix 3.2). I can use the card in Libranet 2.0 (debian woody) it has a spare hard drive hooked up to it.

If you have an onboard (built-in) scsi controller or a pci scsi card, to start up knoppix you would use:

knoppix aha152x *+ any other cheat-codes

I don't know if this will work for knoppix on your hardware but it might.

How much memory do you have? Knoppix and most newer linux distro's need quite a bit of memory and a fairly fast processor.

HTH

rock

**Henk Poley** · 05-10-2003, 11:25 AM

Originally Posted by crackjap

The boot diskette boot the system, but it failed to mount the CD file system since it can not find the CDRW and the system prompt for the device driver module for the SCSI card. Since I do not have one [..]

You do have one, for the OS there's no difference between a card stuck in a PCI or ISA slot, or it being hardwired to the bus (on-board of the mobo). You can let windows sort the devices by connection/bus, you will see that your card is listed on the ISA bus (at least if
RockMumbles is correct).

off topic, but... how much is RAM installed? If you do a harddisk install, could you put up message here how (fast) it runs? I would ditch my old Suse 6.4 install if I knew it would run nicely in X. btw, try booting in XFCE or Fluxbox