Re: Old Pentium Installation Woes

[Mike Shaw <mshaw@wwisp.com>]

At 10:31 AM 6/10/2002 -0500, Brandon Young wrote:
>Hello all, I have been trying unsuccesfully for two days to get OpenBSD to
>install on one of two old 60 MHz Pentiums.  I am experienceing the same
>behavior on both machines.  At power on, the machine posts, counts the RAM,
>and detects the hard disks (and, as usual, displays detected drives on the
>screen).  It then boots off the OpenBSD-3.1 floppy [I'm trying to do an ftp
>install].  During the boot process, I'm reading the dmesg as it scrolls by
>and notice it never reports any information about the hard disk.

I've had this a couple times with a couple older HP pentium machines.  In 
both cases upgrading the BIOS to the latest possible image made it work 
like a champ.  You might try that.

Another thing that I've done in these situations is to put a seperate IDE 
controller in.  This has also resulted in substantially better performance 
at least once.   This is also a good idea since unfriendly controllers may 
be a source of angst down the road.

Just a couple ideas.

-Mike