Linux friendly hardware guy?

[Rob Sutherland]

ted leslie wrote:

>
>you might also want to see if your bios was effected, and if you had special
>bios setting for your OS, i.e. plug-and-pray, or LBA (for disk), etc, etc.
>But i sonund to me like "initializing hardware"  (when i google)
>it is usually accompanied by something like  fb0: initializing hardware ,
>or something more specific to a particular device?
>
>  
>
Thanks for your response.

Well, I've made some progress and it looks like things aren't as dire as 
I thought. I have CentOS, PC-BSD and
Win98 installed. and I'm using Grub. I've succeeded in booting Win98, 
which is what I'm using now (it's like one of those terrible nightmares
where you only have one desktop and the shell sucks :-) ) but CentOS and 
PC-BSD both die during boot - they don't die at at the same
place everytime however and I'm not seeing any device specific errors. I 
can also boot tomsrtbt, a nice little floppy linux distro and
verify that my hard drives are ok, I can mount them and access data. So 
that's good. Another interesting fact is that the Win98 install
I'm running is from a previous machine - an old piece of junk. When it 
died, I ripped out the drive and had a guy stick it in a new machine
with all kinds of new stuff. I've never used it until now or updated it 
with new drivers to handle things like USB and a DVD drive so I'm 
starting to
think that the problem relates to something in that area. The fact that 
tomsrtbt works would also seem to point in that direction. So, I'll keep 
trying
to narrow it down.

Rob

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