[openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?
- From: "Brian Verre" <bverre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:36:41 -0500
While I sympathize with people wanting to use older machines to mess around (I
have a few myself ATM), as a general question, wouldn't it make more sense to
cut ties with this older hardware while Haiku is a fledgling system?
Target i686/x64 for R1, etc? A quite affordable 'modern' system can run QEMU at
P/200 speeds, or just use virtualization. I built a new AMD64 system for a
friend for around $200 (complete) a few months ago. Used case, 40gb drive and
DVD/CDR drive sure, but the HD can be had for $10 used, and the disc drive $20
new if I didn't have a couple.
Maybe I'm off base here, but it is an honest question about moving on. Use
those old PCs as appliances of some sort instead?
Regards
-Brian
________________________________
From: openbeos-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Gerald Zajac
Sent: Sat 7/14/2007 3:16 PM
To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?
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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