Very Computer

Help! help!

I understand DOS a bit and love to do works under DOS.  I have a chance to look
at my friend's dual DOS/LINUX-Xterm system and I change my mind about LINUX.
I wanted to install a same system that my friend has onto my 486DX33.  
Unfortunately, the A1 disk does not complete its tasks.  It hung my system
with "scsi 3 time out - comand abort" error.

SHould I give up and never think about installing LINUX on my PC again ?

I have:
486DX-33 PC with 16MB ram
TSENG4000 VGA card+19" color monitor
Sound Blaster Pro Card
SONY CDS560i CD drive
200MB IDE drive
100MB SCSI drive + Future Domain TMC-850M SCSI controller.
..

Sincerly I don't want to give up, but I can not go any further without helps.

Ben Tong

Why give up?  Your configuration looks fine to me (I'm not sure if
your specific SCSI controller is supported, though mine is, an
Ultrastor34F).  You didn't mention what bootdisk you used.  I have
also occasionally had trouble in the past with bootdisks.  I have used
both SLS and Slackware distributions, and have had trouble with bootdisks
from each of them at one time or another.  My suggestion is to have
your friend build a kernel for you with only the options your
machine will need.  Make sure he sets root to /dev/fd0 and sets the
ramdisk size to 1440K.  Copy to a floppy with dd if=zImage of=/dev/fd0.

Finally, boot off the floppy, and insert the "defective" bootdisk when
prompted (it still has the file system on it).  

Alternatively, you could try a different bootdisk.  If you haven't
tried it, try the slackware bootdisk: ftp.cdrom.com in pub/linux/slackware
as bootdisk.gz.

ARAW

Humour me, take out the CD & soundblaster and try again.

There are often hardware conflicts which show up through auto-device
detection. Even though there may be no hardware conflicts, the software
might think it sees a non-existent device and hang!

CD's & net cards are prime candidates....