Re: speed up boot on laptop with ancient BIOS

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

.

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