Guest AZAVEDO Posted October 1, 2004 Report Share Posted October 1, 2004 My wife has an old Thinkpad 365XD 120MHz Pentium with 40MB RAM, 1.08GB IDE Hard disk, Built-in 4X IDE CDROM and external 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive. We had Win98 but we just got fed up of it. What we want to do: This thinkpad is old and I have read on the internet that folks have installed Linux on it. I just want to run some version of Linux on this vintage and let my wife use it for surfing the net and checking her e-mails and do some word processing. I think this should be possible. All we have is a 1.0 GB HD and 40 MB of RAM (that's the max you can have on this vintage). Problems I had installing: (1) Booted laptop using normal boot.img and on accessing internal CDROM drive had i/o errors (after spinning the CD for a very very long time). Finally gave up and tried to do (2) using a PCMCIA external LG CDwriter I have from EXPNET.com. (2) Booted using PCMCIA.img and my LG external drive got recognized and the Mandrake CD read, then when Drakx installer started it went far as Accept license and then find rest of the hardware. Problem on Hard Drive detection. Message: *****A Found "[ar[prt_pc","imm","ppa", interfaces Do you have another one? Yes No See hardware info [Option to select Yes,No or See hardware info] and Click on NEXT tab If you select YES, it tries to find you a SCSI hard disk with different drivers for disks selection. 'See hardware info' just displays all the hardware that it has found so far. Selection of NO, gives the following error: An error occured - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystesm. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem and on OK redisplays Message: *******A I am a newbie can anyone please give me some pointers what to do at this point. I think the problem is when we boot from pcmcia.img it does not detect the Hard Disk. Appreciate your help. Thank you...Ave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted October 1, 2004 Report Share Posted October 1, 2004 I think you're right :) Look up what module (=driver in Windows) you need for your harddrive and load it manually (with ctrl-alt-f2, modprobe <module-name>). But first check what the minumum hardware requirements are for Mandrake 10. Have fun Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jglen490 Posted October 3, 2004 Report Share Posted October 3, 2004 I, too, have a TP365XD. I'm using it right now. Actually, you can go higher on RAM and on the hard drive. With a BIOS update that I got from IBM's site a couple of years ago, I was able to get up to 72MB (8MB base, and a 64MB module) and I have a 3.2GB drive. I tried MDK 10, but could never get the setup to run, so I went back to MDK 9.2. MDK 9.2 works pretty well -- I use IceWM as my graphical view of the world and have experimented with various apps. Right now I use Galeon for my browser and Evolution for e-mail. They are a bit "heavy", but are (so far) fairly stable. The TP365XD is still a good piece of hardware, for an oldy, but it is necessary to be patient, do some research and experiment with various apps, and above all move slow!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted October 4, 2004 Report Share Posted October 4, 2004 if you can get 9.2 installed, as jglen suggested, you could then do an update to 10.0 via urpmi. have you tried XFce, jglen? I use that on my poor underpowered laptop (P2/450, 128MB ram) and it works nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest debian1sy8 Posted October 19, 2004 Report Share Posted October 19, 2004 I, too, have a TP365XD. I'm using it right now. Actually, you can go higher on RAM and on the hard drive. With a BIOS update that I got from IBM's site a couple of years ago, I was able to get up to 72MB (8MB base, and a 64MB module) and I have a 3.2GB drive. I tried MDK 10, but could never get the setup to run, so I went back to MDK 9.2. MDK 9.2 works pretty well -- I use IceWM as my graphical view of the world and have experimented with various apps. Right now I use Galeon for my browser and Evolution for e-mail. They are a bit "heavy", but are (so far) fairly stable. The TP365XD is still a good piece of hardware, for an oldy, but it is necessary to be patient, do some research and experiment with various apps, and above all move slow!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> hi jglen490 ... Can you please point me to that BIOS update ? And does anyone know if this vintage can make any use of a 32-bit PCMCIA card ? I want to get a LAN card for the GNU/Linux install .. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jglen490 Posted October 19, 2004 Report Share Posted October 19, 2004 I, too, have a TP365XD. I'm using it right now. Actually, you can go higher on RAM and on the hard drive. With a BIOS update that I got from IBM's site a couple of years ago, I was able to get up to 72MB (8MB base, and a 64MB module) and I have a 3.2GB drive. I tried MDK 10, but could never get the setup to run, so I went back to MDK 9.2. MDK 9.2 works pretty well -- I use IceWM as my graphical view of the world and have experimented with various apps. Right now I use Galeon for my browser and Evolution for e-mail. They are a bit "heavy", but are (so far) fairly stable. The TP365XD is still a good piece of hardware, for an oldy, but it is necessary to be patient, do some research and experiment with various apps, and above all move slow!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> hi jglen490 ... Can you please point me to that BIOS update ? And does anyone know if this vintage can make any use of a 32-bit PCMCIA card ? I want to get a LAN card for the GNU/Linux install .. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'll see if I can find that BIOS link for you - it's been a couple of years since I pulled it down. But, as for the 32-bit question, the book says the following: "The PC Card slots operate at 5V and support the following: Type I, Type II, and Type III PC Cards, 16 bit PC Card (PCMCIA 2.0,2.1/JEIDA 4.1,4.2 " As I said, I'll try to find the BIOS link and post it here. Take care. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jglen490 Posted October 19, 2004 Report Share Posted October 19, 2004 O.K., here's the link at IBM: http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?r...8&cc=us&lang=en Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest debian1sy8 Posted October 20, 2004 Report Share Posted October 20, 2004 Thank you very much jglen490 :) I've seen the 16-bit part in the book ... but I thought it would be OK :( I've searched *a lot* on the internet to check any potential downwards compatibility from a 32-bit Cardbus to a 16-bit slot as the slot on the 365XD's appear to be .. oops, in fact are .. But I didn't find a clue :( Ok, I'll look for a 16-bit PCMCIA ethernet card then .. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest debian1sy8 Posted October 20, 2004 Report Share Posted October 20, 2004 Side note : I successfully updated the BIOS to the abovementioned one even if my battery pack is more dead than alive ;) You just have to make sure that the AC current is always flowing during the update process. jglen490> what is the reference of the 3.2GB drive ? Can I just plug any drive with the same form factor ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest uhenninger Posted February 18, 2005 Report Share Posted February 18, 2005 No idea whether anyone still reads this... i had similar problems with hard drive detection. Solved them by booting with the <alt1> option. (at the boot splash, hit F1 to enter the help system, then type "alt1" and enter at the boot prompt). Concerning your Hard Drive: You won't get very far with that 1 G, but actually any larger disk should work. You may have to pad the casing, though... hth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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