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

[James P. Kinney III]

It may have been that during the repartition you also dumped a tiny, 2 M
partition. I've run into several systems that had one. That partition
contained the real "bios" code that the hunk of junk needed to run. You
will need to get a restore CD for the machine and restore it winme. Then
run fdisk manually and only kill the active winme partition.

There were several hard drives that used special drivers found on a
hidden partition that the bios new to find. Conner, Maxtor, and Western
Digital all played that game for a while. 

Try dropping in a  different hard drive and see if you can install that
way. DOS is running because it's just on a floppy and not looking at the
hard drive at all. Chances are good it doesn't even "see" a hard drive.

On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 10:41, David S. Jackson wrote:
> 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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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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