Request for assistance

[albert at ccs.neu.edu (Albert Cahalan)]

> I have been unable to boot Linux, using bare and/or modern bootdisks with 
> colrlite and/or tty12 rootdisks.  The boot disk seems to work but, after 
> the rootdisk is started and the root file system is installed, my machine 
> freezes.

So it prompts you, you put in the ________ root disk for 1.2meg drives,
it tells you it is loading a Minix filesystem from device 2/something,
and you get 'VFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem) readonly.' or something
like that.  Right?

> I have an ISA motherboard with an AMD 386DX40
> and a 387 math coprocessor and 8M of RAM.

This should work.  Check your BIOS settings - wait states, DRAM refresh,
cache, shadow ROM, bus speeds, etc.

> I believe my 125M hard drive and/or controller are IDE.

Open the case and look.  IDE drives have a power cable and one 40-pin
ribbon cable.  50 pins would be SCSI and 2 cables would be an XT drive.

> I have a VGA video board with a mono monitor.

Should work, but you could try a blind login and see if you can make the
disk light go on with 'cat /dev/hda >> /dev/null'.

> My only floppy is a 5.25" 1.2M drive.

Ouch.  A new drive will cost you $35 to $40.