On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 10:20:17AM -0400, Peter King wrote:
Thanks for all the suggestions. Here's what I've found out so far.
First, the computer simply won't boot with only RAM/videocard/CDR drive; it keeps saying there is a bootdisk error (presumably because there are no discs attached).
Second, I finally located some jumpers, and have checked all the settings on the two hard drives and the CDRW drive; they all show up correctly in the BIOS POST screen, so that seems fine.
Third, I tried to swap out the video card -- you never know -- only to find that I don't have a spare PCIe video card to put in its place, and the video cards I do have aren't PCI. But one good thing came of that. When I put the video card back in and reseated everything, then, for one brief shining moment, the Gentoo install disc booted all the way up into the framebuffer (hi Tux!) until freezing at the "loading drivers etc. into memory" message. An immediate cold reboot, however, did not get as far as the framebuffer, That makes it likely that some piece of hardware is just flaky. Probably not the CDR drive, since I've had the same behaviour out of two drives and three cables. So now I'm guessing either the video card itself, the motherboard, or the power supply.
Fourth, tried Knoppix, and, like SysRescueCD, it fails to load with the message that the data is corrupt. Odd, since, like SysRescue, it boots just fine on other equipment.
From here I could try to run down a Really Old install disc, to see what happens. Or haunt a few electronics stores to find an old video card to swap out the current one. As for a longer shot, see if there is a BIOS upgrade in case there is some deep problem there. But most likely what I'll do is stick one of the hard drives in another computer, install a distro there, and see if the $@#!% computer will boot from a regular if lightweight linux on its master hard drive.
(At some point this will no longer be fun. But not yet.)
Sounds like either your power supply or mainboard has some voltage issues then. Or you could have a bad IDE cable top the CD drive. Or a bad CD drive. -- Len Sorensen