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Post by alexham36 on Nov 24, 2013 14:33:35 GMT
 Installed Linux Mint onto an old 10GB IDE HD, but could not make it work satisfactorily. It would boot up only if the HD was jumperred as a master and that meant that the BIOS did not see my main 250GB HD on which I run WinXP. It was very slow to boot up, up to 2mins + and it would not Suspend nor Hibernate. The monitor crashed twice - see attached. Back to the drawing board and Puppy. Alex |
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Post by johnnybee on Nov 25, 2013 1:32:19 GMT
I'm still sucking my back teeth on this one, Alex, as it defies any of my experiences in dual booting Linux and windoze.
For one thing, the BIOS is built into the motherboard and isn't affected by anything that's on the drives - apart from the name of the OS, obviously - so you should get the dual-boot choice screen as soon as it boots up. You then select which system you want, hit enter and it boots into that system.
It may be to do with the jumpering issue, as old IDE drives like to be told where they are in the pecking order; as a suggestion, just try setting both to cable select and connecting them up with the 250Gb drive as master and the 10Gb drive as slave; if that doesn't work, try reversing them. Sometimes you have to play about a bit before you get a result - best of luck, mate!
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Post by johnnybee on Nov 26, 2013 1:37:30 GMT
Any joy with that strategy, Alex?
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Post by alexham36 on Nov 26, 2013 13:49:30 GMT
Any joy with that strategy, Alex? Thank you for the advice and interest Jonnybee. I regret having to report that I could not make it work. I wiped the HD and installed a new copy of the OS. All other HDs were unplugged. The installation went OK, until it came to the end and I was prompted to reboot. The monitor went black and the cursor continued flashing, but the system did not reboot, so I did a soft reboot manually. It took about 2½ minutes to boot up. Applilactions were very slow and then the display crashed. Another soft reboot and it worked for a few minutes and then it froze and the mouse did not work. I saw no point in trying to get it to work with the other drives connencted, so I formatted the HD to NTFS and it is now waiting for the next "disaster"! In comparison, PCLinuxOS-KDE, which is a larger OS, worked without a hitch. I think that it was that particular distribution of Lint (Uni. of Kent) that has something wrong with it, but I am not advanced enough to correct it. Thanks again, Alex |
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Post by mikkh on Nov 26, 2013 18:55:01 GMT
The release candidate for 16 came out a few weeks ago, which means the full release is due soon If you want to try that go here ... distrowatch.com/?newsid=08160Most distros have a native desktop, like PClinuxOS has KDE and other versions can be iffy but mostly they are fine. You mentioned Cinnamon which is not the native desktop for Mint - 'Mate' is the default and it's best to start there if you haven't been put off it already. Either way, you should really use the latest version (16) A release candidate basically means it's the full version as checked on common configurations, but held back a while to test on more obscure machines. I've tested many release candidates in the past and they all work fine - a few were actually better than the full release! |
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Post by johnnybee on Nov 27, 2013 21:06:39 GMT
Have to agree with Mikky on this one, Alex; seems to me that you've got your mitts on a rogue download from somewhere or other, and it's suffering from the twisted knickers syndrome.
I had a similar experience when I DL'd Sabayon v.10 a few months ago; that wouldn't work out of the box either - very similar symptoms to those you've described - so I DL'd the same OS from another mirror site and it installed first time.
Still running happily on an old HP s478 P4 upstairs; mind you, it's a big OS at 3.4Gb, but you wanna see the graphics you get with it - awesome!
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Post by alexham36 on Nov 28, 2013 14:28:44 GMT
I downloaded Ubuntu 12.04.3 AMD64 late last night and tried it this morning. Firstly, the display crashed when I wanted to try it without installation. When I installed it it would not boot up. I got a BIOS message "Out of Range" on the monitor followed by several lines of [[19~ , which meant nothing to me. You are right about rogue distributions, because this is the second time that I tried Ubuntu 12.04 and the first one worked - or at least it did boot up. I have installed PCLinuxOS-KDE on that HD (10GB) and, apart from not being able to Hibernate nor Sleep, everything works and there are more applications on it that I will ever need. Where do old computers go to die?  I need to scrounge a larger HD - 20GB would be great. Alex |
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Post by mikkh on Nov 28, 2013 17:19:35 GMT
I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat it here. If you want cheap old drives and some not so old, get down down to your local car boot sale, flea market, jumble sale whatever and look for Sky+ and Sky+ HD boxes The Sky+ older one has a Seagate 160 GB IDE drive in it - look underneath the Sky box, it should say 80 GB personal storage (the other 80 GB is reserved for the Sky OS etc and will need to be wiped to get the full 160 GB back) The Sky+ HD has a 500 GB SATA drive in it and may also say personal storage underneath but not always (it will say 250 GB if it is marked) Price wise for the Sky+ is usually a couple of quid up to a fiver, unless you get a dreamer and you should find it intact mostly The Sky+ HD anything from a few quid up to a tenner BUT.... You've got to be careful, it's a bigger more desirable size and especially in my area, you may find them robbed already and end up buying yourself a pile of useless junk. Drives are fairly heavy, so if it feels light don't touch it - and don't buy 3 off the same person like I did ! All 3 were empty !!  |
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Post by johnnybee on Nov 28, 2013 18:46:00 GMT
One thing I would mention here is that by and large, IDE drives under 120Gb are gonna be anywhere between five and ten years old, so it's as well to check the ticket on the cover before buying.
Mikk's right about the Sky boxes, but other DVD machines also use HDD's as well; I got the 160Gb SATA drive for the old HP P4 rig out of an XBox 360 that my nephew had steadily destroyed - like he destroys everything else he touches!
Some DVD player/recorders have them too; I had a Hitachi machine that had lost its video output, and that had a 400Gb drive inside - ain't I the lucky one?
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I need to scrounge a larger HD - 20GB would be great.
