Old computer + new hd: can't boot from hard drive

Andersson

I have a really old computer, a pentium 120, which I installed gentoo on.

Installation was successful, but I have problems booting up gentoo. Booting from the hard drive is probably not an option -I get a Primary HDC failure - Press F1 to RESUME error when booting. Perhaps the bios can't handle large drives (it's 40 Gb). I can't even get to the bios setup, I've tried delete, F1-F12, and pretty much every key I could find. So I need a boot disk.

The slackware boot disk can boot slackware from another partition on the hard disk (it can boot gentoo as well, but there's no devfs in the default slack kernel). Smart boot manager doesn't find any hard drive (none listed in the menu), neither does the grub boot disk (selected disk does not exist).

I tried making my own boot disk, but make zdisk in /usr/src/linux/ says my kernel is too big (1014 kb -how small does it need to be?) and if I just dd my kernel to a floppy I get a message about "booting from floppy not supported anymore -use a bootloader".

I do have a 1 Gb hd that I know works, but it's very old and I'm afraid it will crash. Besides, there's no room inside the case for it.

I'm out of ideas. Suggestions please

daniel87 · n00b Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 10 Location: Sweden

I've have the same problem as you. So I googled and found a bootloader that not use bios.
It can be downloaded from [url]http://www.linuxsoft.cz/en/sw_detail.php?id_item=885[/url].
I didn't now how to configure it, but you can maybe do it. If you can have nunimbr on your old drive and nuni on your new can you set your old one as primary and your new as none in bios.

Andersson · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 10:12 pm Post subject:

You're right, it looks like it should work with this nuni program. You're also right in that it seems tricky to use

I'll try again tomorrow.

OhSh33t · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 3:20 am Post subject:

Hi Andersson,

I'm having the same problem trying to help one of my friends. I loaded Gentoo onto an old Dell Optiplex Intel MMX 200something MHz. Setup fdisk per the install docs except I'm using Ext3 file system for my /boot partition versus Ext2, thus needing to make hda1 +64M instead of +32M.

Everything compiled just fine. Setup grub per the install doc's and when it came time to reboot.. I get the dreaded "Primary Hard disk not found". Checked on Phoenixbios site and they say that they don't provide bios upgrades for Dell hardware.. Went to Dells site and they only provide bios upgrades via windows installer.... So I don't even know if the Bios upgrade Dell provides would even remedy the problem. Looking into that..

Any suggestions? And did you come up with a work around for your problem? Please share.

Thanks,
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Andersson · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 1:18 pm Post subject:

I never got nuni to work. I thought about emailing the author with some questions, but then I solved the problem by trading the 40 Gb hard drive for a 20 Gb one instead and copied all the partitions. The computer booted just fine

If your friend's computer is newer than mine, perhaps he can boot from a cd. I don't have that option in bios, but if I had I might have tried making some kind of bootable cd with a custom kernel and then chrooting to the hard drive. I'm going to use it as a firewall, so I figured I wouldn't have to boot it very often.

Hmm.... And you're sure it's the hd and not just that you forgot the bootable flag or running lilo/grub or something? How big is it?

gringo · Advocate Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 3793

If the drive is form seagate, how about giving diskwizard a try ??

I believe each manufacturer has its own utility doing this job. I know its not a perfect solution but you drive will boot and work in any computer.

stonent · Veteran Joined: 07 Aug 2003 Posts: 1139 Location: Texas

If it is failing before booting then software won't fix it. Check the drive docutmentation for a jumper setting to make the drive appear to be smaller. Once linux is booted it will see the full size of the drive. (I had to do this on an old P133 that failed with my 2.7gb Maxtor drive, but jumpering it for 2.1gb allowed it to boot and see the whole drive under Linux)
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20589

Moved from OTG to Kernel & Hardware.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

OhSh33t · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 5:11 pm Post subject:

OhSh33t · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 7:43 pm Post subject:

OhSh33t · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 8:33 pm Post subject:

Ok.. assuming that we can't find a quick workaround can we just boot off the CD... chroot in and setup the firewall.. bring up the interfaces.. start the firewall and just leave the machine running?

Are these the correct steps for getting back in and doing what I need to do?

OhSh33t · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 9:44 pm Post subject:

Andersson · Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2004 1:19 am Post subject: