Hi! I have just acquired in my possession a Packard Bell computer with a 1.2 GB hard drive and 72 MB of RAM. I am trying to load Debian on it. I downloaded the CD images from a cdimage.debian.org, and burned them with my cd-burner using xcdroast. I verified the images twice and used them to install Slink on a friend's computer.
When I first tried to install Slink on the Packard Bell computer, I had to use three different Driver floppies before I found one that wasn't flaky. Once I did that, I booted into the setup program and proceeded to install Slink and erase the windows partition. Because I was impatient at the time, I neglected to scan the hard drive for bad-blocks. I used the SBPCD module for the proprietary CD-ROM drive. When I booted into the new system, things started going wrong. dselect and anything that used perl started giving me segfaults every time I tried to run them. Then, I got an EXT@ PANIC from the kernel indicating that the filesystem was bad. I ran fsck -c a couple of times, but no cigar. Next, I reinstalled from scratch. Everything went OK, and I did a badblocks scan on the hard drive. While that was running, I used kernel-package to build a 2.2.4 kernel for the Packard Bell, including the bare-bones and the SBPCD module. The base system installed fine, but when I rebooted, the cd drive started giving me errors in the middle of the dselect "Update" mode. The errors complained of read timeouts on the drive. I crossed my fingers and installed the 2.2.4 kernel from a floppy, only to reboot and see pages of hex codes at the time init usually starts /bin/login. I rebooted again, and everything seemed OK. DSelect liked my CD if I told it it was a single cd, not part of a multi-cd set. I started installing the "standard" packages when the CD drive crapped out. I'm at a loss about what to do at this point. Should I remove the memory and hard drive and throw the system in the trash? Anyone have any tips about troubleshooting SBPCD? The system in general appears flaky, can anyone help? -- Stephen Pitts [EMAIL PROTECTED] webmaster - http://www.mschess.org