[openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?

  • From: Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:16:28 -0400

Urias McCullough wrote:
On 7/14/07, Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Urias McCullough wrote:
> On 7/14/07, Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Recently I attempted to run Haiku on two old computers that are about 10
>> years old with 200 and 233 MHz MMX Pentium processors, respectively.
>> The boot process would not start;  that is, the Haiku boot screen did
>> not appear, and nothing was written to the syslog via the serial port.
>> BeOS booted and ran okay on both of these computers.
>
> You're experiencing bootloader issues
The bootloader is failing on only these two computers, and works fine on
the other newer computers where I have used that hard disk.  That is,
Haiku boots fine from that hard disk in other newer computers.  I'm
using Haiku R41492.  Could it be some BIOS peculiarity or the north
and/or south bridge chipsets in these computers?  Both computers use the
Intel chips SB82437VX and SB82371SB.

Right - in order to get my P75 laptop to boot, I used a notebook drive
conversion cable to hook it up to my PII 350 machine running BeOS R5 -
and then formatted the disk as BFS and installed Haiku to it... that
disk was 500mb

In other situations, however, I have not had much luck taking a 4gb HD
that I formatted and installed Haiku on using the same PII 350
machine, and trying to boot that disk on a P200. I am thinking
possibly that the PII 350 sees the disk with different geometry (LBA?)
than the P200 does and this may be the reason that the P200 is not
able to boot the disk once formatted/installed with the PII 350. I
have not tried with smaller disks yet, but I suspect that may end up
"solving" my problem.
Both of these computers have LBA ability since they have 2 and 3 GB hard drives and the BIOS screen states that they are LBA; however, the drive I was trying to boot Haiku from is a 20 GB drive which has 4 partitions. It has one partition each for BeOS and Zeta, and two partitions that I use for Haiku (i.e., two separate rev's of Haiku). The 20 GB drive is normally in a computer that I use for testing the video drivers that I'm working on. Monday I will try installing Haiku on an older, smaller hard drive (1 GB) where it will be the only partition on the drive, and see if that works any better.

Regards,
Gerald


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