Bobsanderson

k- im building my friend a computer out of various parts that I have collected. I have an emachines 333k shell, and i am pretty sure the mother board is also the original emachines, but evrrything else is new. The motherboards original harddrive ran Win98, but the new one I plugged in I am trying to install the DSL (damn small Linux), but everytime I try to install it off of the live boot it says error, and the install window closes. Also, it keeps locking up and all that, and the cd-rom drive is faulty because it works about half the time. Any suggestions? Oh, and i plugged the hdd into another comp and installed the DSL os on it and tried to plug and play, but it didn't even recognize the HDD. (with a GRUB boot sys)

shuuhen

What exactly is locking up? Is the computer locking up when running DSL from the CD or something else?

What is the exact error you get related to the hard drive? Is it the only hard drive in the emachines computer? Was it the only hard drive while you installed DSL on the other machine? GRUB may be having specific issues depending on what it thinks the number of drives was at install time.

Bobsanderson

By locking up i mean i cannot do anything, and have to reboot and hope the cdrom drive recognizes the iso boot file on the cd. To go to the history of the HDD, it originally had windows xp media center edition on it, but then screwed up and told me i had to reactivate windows. I said screw it, and wiped it clean with Ubuntu Linux V. 6 (*all of this was on another computer) after a while i got another, better HDD for that comp and then put the old one into storage for a while, then brought it out for this comp im building. I proceeded to plug and play, but then my video card wasn't 'good' enough so i wiped the hard drive clean, made three linux partitions (primary), the 1st 200 MB, 2nd 300 mb, and the last 300 MB. When i tried to install it on the computer via live boot, it tried to install and i could only make out the word error before the window closed. i tried several more times, all of them failing, and also couldn't make out any more words. Thats when i plugged into my best desktop comp and installed it, the DSL on hda2, and grub on hda1. when i succussfully rebooted from the HDD, no cd, i customized the account, i tried to shut down, and it said error, saying that i hadn't backed up/ restored, and that the shut down was aborted. i said screw it and hit the power, then rebooted to see if i hadn't corrupted any files. When i saw that it was okay, i unplugged the HDD and plugged it into the other comp, where it did not even recognize it. i then, after a couple more tries, plugged back into the comp where i installed it on, where it had 2 screens of different inoperable errors, and then that it tried to kill the idle task. That is where im at right now... and yes it was the only HDD in the comp at the time, as the windows xp version on the new HDD that i have won't recognize slave drives... oh, and i heard horror stories, so to speak, that the 33k emachines tower motherboard can't handle anything but 32 bit os's, and specific ones at that... and to think i pride myself in my computer knowledge....

Bobsanderson

* im meant 333k emachines tower motherboard, sorry bout that