On Saturday 02 July 2005 19:27, Guntupalli Karunakar wrote:

On Sat, 02 Jul 2005 18:37:50 +0500

sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:

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the machine is a 486 with 40MB ram, 4.3GB HDD. (dos/windows too are unable to start up apart from the initial messages.) just curious typically which part of hardware could have gone wrong?

4.3GB?? afaik these machines cant detect a harddisk > 2gb.

this one had a pci bus & LBA thing so could take the 4.3GB.

Doubt that. You can sling a pci bus onto almost anything. The 2GB limit is because of the bios. Once you boot with a floppy linux will work with any disk.

Also memtest will fail if the bios settings are not suitable for the ram. Afaik linux will not interfere with the mem timings. The old rams do not have a serial eeprom for timing params and the mobos do not have an i2c bus to read the params.

i will try that. well just planning to take a new machine, but dont want to junk this out completely, but seeing if i can still get it working, the old beast can still do a lot!!

:-).

rgds jtd