Upgraded Thinkpad 600E problem

[pikaia]

Hey everyone.

 

I'm trying to install Mandriva One XFCE onto my TP600E that I've upgraded the CPU -> PIII on. It installs just fine and all goes well, but because of the mods done to the hardware, the L2 cache has to be disabled to get by the BIOS. In Ubuntu and in PCLinuxOS I've been able to use a grub hack that activates the L2 cache in Grub, but when I perform the hack in Mandriva, I get dumped to a grub> prompt and left utterly confused. I've tried several times, and to no avail.

 

I just got done transferring each modified file one by one into the /boot/grub folder and they all work fine except when I swap the "Stage2" file. This is the one that causes my problem. But unfortunately none of the others seem to activate the L2 cache.

 

Here is a rundown of what is involved to enable the cache.

 

Here is the webpage for the Grub bootloader program:

 

http://kihwal.fayoly.net/600e/grub.html

 

Since I had an existing dual boot system with Grub already installed, and with customized boot options in place, I followed a different procedure for installing than outlined on that page.

 

I did the following:

 

1.) I downloaded the binaries (Boot.zip) and unzipped them. They contain the folder boot/grub containing the deepsleep modified files.

2.) I navigated to my own /boot folder and renamed the /boot/grub folder to /boot/grub-old (this saves the old contents in case we need to revert to them)

3.) I copied the new grub folder to the /boot folder. I did this as super-user (root) and made sure the permissions for all the files matched the old permisions.

4.) I deleted the new /boot/grub/menu.lst document and replaced it with a copy of the one in my /boot/grub-old folder.

5.) I edited this menu.lst by adding the line tpad here:

Code:

 

## timeout sec

# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry

# (normally the first entry defined).

timeout 10

 

## hiddenmenu

# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)

#hiddenmenu

 

tpad

 

# Pretty colours

#color cyan/blue white/blue

 

 

Your menu.lst may look different but the location for the tpad command should be somewhere above the automagic section -- generally near the hiddenmenu section.

6.) I saved the new menu.lst

7.) I copied and added the files device.map and default from my /boot/grub-old folder to the new grub folder -- since the new one lacked these -- different Linux systems will vary, but you should probably copy over to the new folder any files that exist in the old grub folder that are not present in the new one.

8.) I rebooted. Speed reporting programs in both Win98 and Ubuntu both showed that the startup speed was indeed 750 Mhz and the L2 cache was enabled with 256K.

 

Has anyone any thoughts on fixing this? Reinstalling the bootloader from the CD doesn't work. Is there another way to do it that I'm missing?

 

Thanks a lot. I really like the OS and would love to use it...

[pikaia]

A bit of an update. I tried Super Grub Disc again, and no luck there. I tried uninstalling Grub and then reinstalling it (through SGD), but that didn't work. It just boots to a flashing cursor and nothing else. I also tried to reinstall the bootloader/grub through the liveCD and that doesn't work either, it still brings me to the blinking cursor. . It apparently does absolutely nothing on this machine. I went to Control Center/Boot and reinstalled it. But after reboot, theres nothing there. I tried to reinstall the bootloader before and after I uninstalled grub, and it didn't work in either case. I read about a rescue function on the livecd, and tried accessing the that, but I can't seem to find it.

 

Any help would be great. Thanks. I really like the distro and would love to stick with it, but I can't live with only 32kb of cache. Is there anyway I can install the system but not the bootloader and then use a livecd from Ubuntu or PCLOS and (try to) install that one. Do you think this would work... or have a chance to work? I don't know why the bootloader or grub isn't being reinstalled through the livecd.

 

Thanks