John:
I'd be very leary of trying to install Linux on this machine. While
there are some distributions will run on pre-Pentium processors (even
386's), most of the widely available ones want more horsepower (Redhat
and Mandrake want at least a Pentium II, Celeron, or AMD K6-2 as a
minimum). The Promise card isn't going to help matters, either. You're
in for a lot of bit-bashing, web-searching, hair-tearing and plain hard
work, and there are going to be lots of frustrations along the way. I
strongly suggest that you take Tom's advice, and admit that hound can't
hunt no more. An AT motherboard/CPU/RAM transplant might be a good
start.
Regards,
Carroll Grigsby


John Sproule wrote:
>
> Just a follow up on how things worked out with trying to get the Promise
> EIDE MAX II card installed into this older computer.
>
> I was able to get a partial success, finally.  I can get the Promise card to
> see and work with both a 2gb hard drive and an ATAPI IDE CD-ROM.  I did this
> by disabling the connector on the original connector card and by attaching
> the drives to the connectors on the Promise card.  I found that I had to use
> just one device per connector.  For some reason, the BIOS fails to detect
> the second device if it is attached to the same connector as a slave.  I
> tried this both with the CD-ROM and with another hard drive.  I tried both
> the usual Master and Slave settings, as well as the Master with Slave
> Present setting.
>
> Although this is much less than optimal, since I had hoped that this set up
> would be capable of handling up to 6 IDE devices, instead of only 2, it is
> good enough to work with.
>
> The tentative plans are to use it as a text-only OS machine running MS-DOS
> and some old programs available for it and also to install Linux in order to
> see more of what it has to offer.
>
> I may be back with new questions when I get around to trying to set up the
> dual boot configuration for these two operating systems.
>
> By the way, my checking into the vendor linked from the MR BIOS site didn't
> lead to what I had hoped for.  I was thinking there might be a new mb BIOS
> chip that could be installed.  After talking with one of the vendor's reps,
> all they could suggest was their own BIOS update card.  I was skeptical as
> to whether it would be able to do any better than the Promise card, so I
> didn't take it them up on it.
>
> Still waiting to hear back from Promise Tech Support.  :-)
>
> Thanks again for the helpful responses.
>
> John

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml