Hi, I've finally got my Dell Dimension E520 desktop (don't trust the delivery company they use, stood me up three times in two days) and managed to boot System Rescue CD to shrink the Windows XP partition on it, but sticking the ia64 CD-ROM 1 or ia64 netinst of Debian Etch on memory stick causes it to just sit without doing anything as soon as the POST checks are over. It doesn't beep or print an error.
I also tried the live debian CD for i386 and it boot but complains that it can't find vmlinuz. I got the impression that the ia64 build of Debian Etch assumes that all ia64 use EFI instead of BIOS and therefore something is missing on the CD image. System Rescue CD seems not to assume this and therefore it manages to boot. Am I correct to suspect that this is the problem and if so then how can I fix this? I'd rather not activate the Windows XP on that system because I want to move it somewhere else, but if nothing else works then I'm thinking of maybe trying to download and execute the image from http://goodbye-microsoft.com/through the Windows system - would that work? Another thing I intend to test is to start with the i386 install but I'm not sure it's going to work and even then it would mean I'll have to somehow switch architecture after the initial install. I also looked in the BIOS for a way to tell it to treat SATA as PATA, which used to be a problem on older linux' and hardware but didn't find a way to do that. I'd appreciate any suggestions people might have. Cheers, --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
