[Devil-linux-develop] Boot problem.

[Bruce S. <bw...@ar...>]

I recently had this brilliant idea to install Linux on a couple older
boxes.  I have a P5-166 and a P5-100.  Both have 80MB of memory, and a
IDE CD drive.  Both PC's boot a Windows-98 CDROM fine.  When I boot
either PC from the latest DL CD, it reads the CD briefly, then I get:

  isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it...
  isolinux: Failed to access CD-ROM device; boot failed.

The same DL CD works fine on a newer PC.  I tried a new CD drive on the
P5-1xx PC's and I get the same error.  I checked for a newer BIOS on
both PC's, and they are already running the latest.

A lot of google'ing leads me to believe this is a common problem with
older BIOS's.  The syslinux/isolinux page implies old PC's like this may
work with "memdisk" instead of isolinux, but that requires a floppy
image, which we don't produce and a standard size floppy image would be
too large to produce with all the modules we include in the initrd.

Any suggestions before I try and produce a floppy image (minus the SCSI
modules), and try and make it boot with memdisk, or standard mkisofs and
a eltorito boot image ???

P.S.  This is bad if DL won't boot on older PC's ...

 - BS