Perils of Old Hardware
So today's challenge was to install Fedora Core 1 on my "play" machine, a circa 1998 K6-300 machine. Besides trying out FC1, I figured on using this machine to backup my primary machine via rdiff-backup. Maybe this machine is slow enough that I could even play gnuchess on this machine without embarrassing myself. Nah.
First problem, the existing 4GB root drive is tiny by today's standards. Fortunately disk drives are relatively cheap these days (hello rebates!), so I picked up a 40GB drive a while ago just for this purpose. The other thing I did was to accumulate a bunch of mobile disk racks to make swapping of drives a snap. This will allow me to swap OSes safely and easily.
So I slid the 40GB drive in, powered up the machine, and endured a few seconds of loud beeping before I realized that I the power connector was a bit loose. Fixed that, and tried again. No beeping, but the BIOS didn't recognize the drive either. Do I have a defective drive or rack? At first I was hoping that it was the rack until I realized that the rack and the drive cost about the same amount.
Fearful that I may have fried the drive with my loose power connector trick, I mounted an old 80GB drive in the rack to see if that worked any better. Nope. Then I realized that the the BIOS on this machine is so old that it didn't recognize drives over 33GB even on it's "LARGE" setting.
After setting the BIOS to ignore that drive, I was able to boot the machine using my old 4GB drive with RedHat 6.2. I could see the drive from there just fine since Linux doesn't use the BIOS for drive access. So that left me with two options:
Always use a floppy drive to boot this machine, but install the OS on the 40GB drive.
Reflash the BIOS.
As easy and safe as the first option was, I opted to reflash the BIOS. Fortunately, the FIC webpage still had information on BIOSes as old as the one I had. After deciphering their arcane versioning system and opening up the case and removing one of my ISA cards to determine the motherboard revision number, I downloaded and installed a compatible BIOS image. Voila! One minor complaint is that the new BIOS seems to wait several minutes before noticing that there is no CD-ROM to boot from before proceeding to boot from the hard drive. Changing the boot order got me around this issue, and I think I might be able to get grub to handle the boot from CD stuff later.
So after all this, Fedora loaded with little fanfare, at least until I tried to bring up the network. Trying to bring up the old 3com 3c905c card hung the machine. This would be the same network card that I had to yank out of my old win98 machine several months ago because it misbehaved there (failed to get DHCP address on bootup with one version of the driver, caused windows shutdown hangs in a different version). I spent a few minutes hacking at it before I came to my senses and realized that a card that has about $2 in value really wasn't worth the time to debug. Besides, I already had a spare NIC in the machine.
Of course, now that I have this machine back in a usable state, I'm out of time to actually use it. That will have to be a saga for another day.