Nate Thern wrote:
> Hello-
> I have an old 486DX laptop on which I run Slackware 9.1. My HD is a 4GB
> from a defunct VAIO. The 486 BIOS cannot recognize the HD, so I use a
> boot floppy with the kernel on the floppy (standard Slackware) and
> specify the root location to LILO. When the kernel loads it recognizes
> the HD and partitions and is able to access the swap space and boot the
> root filesystem.
>
> I'm quite happy with this except for one thing: the kernel takes a
> _very_ long time to load (about 10 minutes). I cannot get LILO to load a
> kernel at hda1 because LILO thinks there _isn't_ an hda.
>
> So, how can I speed up my boot process?
>
> TIA,
> Nate
>
Let me narrow the scope of my question a little bit:
I wish to load something small (the smaller the better) off a floppy
which will probe for and recognize hard drives independent of the BIOS
(it's my understanding that this is what a linux kernel does). From
there I would procede to load my real linux kernel off the HD and
declare root and swap space.
For instance, a DOS floppy boots very quickly on this system. If I could
find a DOS utility to probe for hard drives (I've tried) then I could
run that followed by loadlin.
I'm stuck right now, and don't know where to go. I would appreciate any
suggestions that I can run with.
Nate
Linux