[ale] Spontaneous reboots: NetVista 2254-g23 PIII 1GHz

[David S. Jackson]

Hi,

It's an IBM NetVista 2254 G23 that my wife got through her
company for $600 that came with WinMe and one of those restore
from scratch partitions IBM has been using.  I've repartitioned
the drive (20G) to put Linux on it, but now the system won't even
boot from a floppy.  The kernel messages get as far as
"Calibrating Delay Loop..." and the whole thing reboots
spontaneously.  It will do this ad infinitum every single time,
whether it's a FreeBSD kernel or a Linux kernel.  (With FreeBSD,
it happens after kernel config.)  DOS will still load from a
floppy, though.  However, when Win98SE tries to install, the
machine reboots during the driver installation phase, before the
installation process completes.

I've replaced the memory sticks, that didn't change anything.
I've searched the Web and IBM's site and didn't really find
anything relevant.  I've already taken the box to one tech who
didn't solve any of the problems, except he flashed the bios to
the latest rev level (it's an Intel board and chipset/bios that
came with the box).

Any ideas on what I can do?  I've fiddled with everything in the
BIOS that I can think of, but maybe I'm overlooking something?
Maybe Linux doesn't like the onboard video?  Sounds odd, though.
Could there be something with the drive controller?  Should
still boot from floppy though...

The only next move I can think of is to move the CPU and memory
to a different motherboard?  Try to resalvage the box that way?
What do y'all think?  Anyone ever see this type of thing before?

-- 
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
If only God would give me some clear sign!  Like
making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
		-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

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