Live CD for 486 machine

[ZFMicro]

Hello,

I can't get the live CD 3.0, 3.1 or 3.3 to get past the boot msg on a 486 machine.  I do have success on a Pentium (dark screen though).

I've tried various boot options such as norestore and base. No luck.

Additional info (not meant to be mean): DSL runs OK.

CPU= ZFx86 ZF Micro Solutions, Video= Silicon Motion SM712, LAN= Realtek 8139D

Thanks in advance.

Lee

[gerald_clark]

Remove the quiet boot option and see what messages you get.

[ZFMicro]

Quiet Boot is not an option in my BIOS.

I can view two tinycore option selection screens once I get to a 'boot:' prompt via F2 and F3.  But the system (486) hangs after a selection.

Lee

[maro]

Yeah I guess it's a bit of a bummer that there is only one boot label defined in the 'isolinux.cfg' (which includes the 'quiet' boot code).

I've tried (without success) to find a way around this. If you could boot your system from a USB pendrive, you would be able to adjust the boot loader configuration accordingly. I assume on a fairly old system, that's not an option.

So you would have to re-master the ISO image to get rid of the 'quiet' boot code. As a bit a "naughty" alternative to this you could just use a hex editor and replace (!!) the five bytes that make up the word 'quiet' with five blank characters. Note: There are 3 occurences of this word in the TC 3.3 ISO image, but searching for 'tinycore.gz quiet' will bring you to the correct location. Bear in mind that the size of the image and the relative position of all other bytes need to remain the same, so no deletion of characters, just patching over the surplus boot code. Obviously you'll have to burn another CD-ROM with this patched (or re-mastered) ISO image.

All this makes me wonder whether TC should have an additional, non-default label in 'isolinux.cfg' that just does not feature the 'quiet' boot code.

[tinypoodle]

Emphasizing in same spirit, makes me wonder if quiet should not be removed from default label, and perhaps even a label with boot option 'debug' added.
Might make providing support to unexperienced users more easy.

Personally I would never choose 'quiet' as a boot option for my own use.

[curaga]

"tinycore debug"

[ZFMicro]

tinycore debug - still no joy, just a blinking cursor one line below 'boot'

[Guy]

I had one computer which would only boot with the default options. If anything was changed during boot, it would lock up.

[Guy]

What you could do is:

Remove the hard drive from the computer.

Put it in a computer where it works.

Install Tiny Core.

Put the hard drive back in the original computer.

This is one of the advantages of the frugal installation. You can't do this with a regularly installed operating system.

[tinypoodle]

tinycore debug - still no joy, just a blinking cursor one line below 'boot'

Fishing in dark waters, try additionally boot param 'acpi=off'

[tinypoodle]

What you could do is:

Remove the hard drive from the computer.

Put it in a computer where it works.

Install Tiny Core.

Put the hard drive back in the original computer.

This is one of the advantages of the frugal installation. You can't do this with a regularly installed operating system.

Oh yes, you can.
Have done so many times with scatter installs of slackware and debian.

[ZFMicro]

I was hoping a live CD of a tiny os would work on a tiny cpu.

[tinypoodle]

You might want to have a look at the kernel config file and compare with your hardware.