Had Booting Problem

From: Mike King (emailMK_at_excite.com)
Date: 05/31/05 

Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 09:11:18 -0400

Over the weekend, I tried running Damn Small Linux (DSL) on a old IBM P133
but it had a problem booting from the CDROM directly. The BIOS supported
booting from the CDROM but it had a problem booting DSL, Knoppix, and some
others as well. It would exactly start booting - showing a series of dots
across the screen, but during this process an X would appear then everything
stopped. I solved the problem by booting from a floppy disk that was
created using a program called "oldbios" from
http://ebcd.pcministry.com/download/oldbios.exe. The question I have is why
didn't it work when the BIOS kick-started the booting process? Also, what
do the dots represent when booting? The only thing I can think of is that
it shows the progress of loading the kernel's image into memory. The CDROM
has a standard ATA interface. Also, it has a couple of years on it. The
memory is fine (I ran memtest86 for several hours). I only thing I can
think could be the problem is the BIOS is damaged.

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