Linux friendly hardware guy?

[John Myshrall]

Rob Sutherland wrote:

> 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
>
I had a similar experience recently. The bios for some reason lost it 
hard drive settings. It would not detect the master dive. I set all the 
HD settings to auto in the bios and the box came back to life.

HTH

John
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