On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 21:43, Heracles wrote: > On Tuesday 21 May 2002 12:55, Richard Hayes wrote: > > Dear list, > > > > I have just acquired an old 486 with 200 meg hd. (Versa E 486/50???) > > > > Though I have got the bios set to boot from floppy, it say boot failure. > > It gives an error saying something about Rom bios > > > > Currently the only file on the system is command.com > The old NEC versa 486 machines will not boot from the floppy until they find > the particular HDD that the bios tells them should be there even with the > cmos set to boot from the floppy - so a faulty HDD can cause this problem. > They usually complain about a BIOS problem. > Also, if you do get to load Linux, if it has the usual 12 Mb of RAM, I would > use the console or that really light (on resources) desktop that Ken Caldwell > uses - can't remember its name. > I have redhat 6.1 on a NEC VERSA V/50 running console only as a wireless exercise. If I remember correctly you have to use a distro that can handle a network install with limited memory. I know that later versions of redhat won't allow you to do this on some network installs, i.e. http for instance. I think I did a NFS via another linux box's cd from memory.
Cheers, Antony Clarke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
