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K6-2 Linux system running Puppy issues.

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Last response: in Linux/Free BSD
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I'm unable to install without a freeze up. I can't be sure its the hard drive - which is SMART tripped and I know it to be bad, but still seems to work. Before buying a new one I want to be sure the system is solid. This isn't my question.

I have never had to set jumpers for a system before, as I was not into PCs 15 years ago (I was a senior in HS when my parents bought this system).

Specs:

PC Chips 577 mobo

256mb RAM (dual 128s)

Default POS PSU

PS2 mobo/mouse



I can run memtest without errors, I had to correct the jumper to 100/66mhz from 100/100mhz for that.

Are there any other programs I should run in DOS mode to test the system before proceeding to buy a hard drive? Will Puppy (WARY version) install on a K6-2 system? I swapped out the installed K6-2/350AFR for a 400AFR and applied appropriate jumpers...I think. Wary will load into RAM and install most of the way before crashing out. Windows XP installed as well, but also errors. I believe the CPU to be lacking/not supported by XP. I'm open to any advice here. It seems the capacitors could be going bad but the system seems pretty sound from bios to RAM loaded Puppy. I did however get a freeze up within puppy before, but I believe once again I may have been accessing the HDD for an ext3 format. Thinking outload. I should probably just buy a new HDD and try it.

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Trident vid card, I'd have to look at it for the model and right now I don't feel like it. :p  I also have a PCI TNT2 card from Jaton but I couldn't get a picture for some reason. PCI slot not outputting enough juice maybe? 1.0?

Just to clarify here, Puppy will load fine into RAM but once you've installed to the disk it fails to boot, is that correct?

If so, plus by your own admission, you've said that the HDD is reporting issues in SMART tests, so I think this is a HDD issue.

May I ask why you're so intent on trying to resurrect such an old system? I mean I fully enjoy tinkering with old hardware and getting it to work again, it's a bit of a hobby for me

Its the first system we ever owned. My folks bought it from a place called "Budget Computers. I think it was just some guy. LOL

I just wanted to try fooling with Linux and see if I could get it working. I bought a $10 Sata to IDE gizmo off NewEgg to see if I could use a modern day drive. I've been replacing my drives with SSDs so I have several that are 250GBs or less in capacity and run sorta slow. Linux has some cool older games on it too. Its nice to show my 8 year old daughter where we've come from too. She's so spoiled with her modern day gadgets. :p  The downside with this system is that it will only recognize 32GBs of HDD space...so I'll be using my smallest/slowest drive for it. It has USB 1.0 card headers on the board, but I don't even want to bother with it.
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I've had spotty success with the various SATA<->IDE converters out there, coupled with the BIOS on the thing that is expecting drives in the tens-to-hundreds of megabytes, I'm not too surprised that you're seeing the issues that you are. Unfortunately I don't know that you're going to have success with any drive that's outside of that vintage, but you're likely going to have better success with a proper native IDE drive, although they're getting harder and harder to find. I think here you're just going to have to play around a little to find something that's going to work.

I got the adapter today. The BIOS recognizes the drive name, and I can get Puppy (WARY) to boot off an ISO CD. However, I tried to run GParted first thing and the system locked up. No mouse movement. I set the LBA/Normal/Auto/Large option to Large in the BIOS for the Master Drive. It seems to have worked better than my first run with it set to auto. It couldn't even search the drive for Puppy files when loading Puppy the first time. Any suggestions?

Where did you launch GParted from? the Puppy live image itself? You may want to give the GParted liveCD a try, see if it behaves in the same manner.

In instances like this, you may not even want to bother playing around with more sophisticated tools like parted and its UI, you could just get away with using fdisk (or one of its variants) and the mkfs.$FILESYSTEM of your choice (I would hope Puppy would include these)

I believe it does. I'll take a second look. I believe I need to change settings on the hard drive though. GParted froze when it was searching for drives. Either I change settings, or it just won't work no matter what. The BIOS could be causing the erroneous effect too, due to the drive size. I am not very familiar with Linux at all, which is why this is especially challenging. I was a sophomore in HS I think when skt 7 was first seen, but my parents weren't very technologically up to date. It was our first PC. We had a big electronic Brother typewriter when I was little, but then never even got an Apple. :(  I was starved on vid games as a kid, had to play Oregon Trail at a friend's house. Later on it was Carmen SanDiego. :p 

I used to run a K6-2, in fact my first post here was created on one :) 

The jumper settings are crucial as they set the PCI bus, memory and finally the CPU. The trick as I seem to remember was to get PCI correct so you might want to check those jumpers again, it could be why the graphics card gives you grief. You might find that 100/66 is what you want to go back to, if anything it should only make the RAM run slower which would be less likely to error than running it 100/100.

audiovoodoo said:
I used to run a K6-2, in fact my first post here was created on one :) 

The jumper settings are crucial as they set the PCI bus, memory and finally the CPU. The trick as I seem to remember was to get PCI correct so you might want to check those jumpers again, it could be why the graphics card gives you grief. You might find that 100/66 is what you want to go back to, if anything it should only make the RAM run slower which would be less likely to error than running it 100/100.


As mentioned, I changed jumpers to 100/66mhz before anyone else brought up doing so. I gave up on the project. Parts available for sale. :) 
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