[SOLVED] 30 miles from home and off the wall

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sean
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Re: 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#16 by sean » 12 Feb 2016, 13:03

Hi Porteus Friends,

Thanks for the replies here. I fell ill with the flu on Sunday and haven't felt like doing much other than sleep.

All your replies are appreciated! My stories are never "short" :-)

The computer is a Dell GX280 with a 40 Gigabyte HD, I think the thing is over 12 years old. It is located 30 miles from me, where my mother is a Nursing Home resident. I go there at least once a week, more if I can, weather permitting etc. I won't get there again until maybe next Wednesday (17th). I can't risk giving what I have or had to 300 old folks.

@ donald (thank you :-), In addition to my experience described in the thread opening comment, yes, I do recall trying plop, copy to ram, and AF. None worked, always back to the same hung;
Loading ........... vmlinuz
Loading ........... initrd.xz ...... ready

Also, donald, I will prepare to try bypassing the password as per your link instructions.

@ fanthom (thank you :-), I was trying to boot the computer with Porteus Desktop LXDE, which has worked everywhere for me except with this machine. I will follow your instructions upon my next visit.

@ Ed_P (thank you :-), I shall spend some time looking over your suggestion; Linuxer windows naive user: best setup, and hopefully be prepared for success.

Thank you also Bogomips, brokenman, Jack, francois, and beny also. Porteus users have got to be the most responsive folks, always in a positive manner, anywhere !!!

Hope I have not wasted anyone's time with this.

Sincerely,

Sean

sean
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Re: 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#17 by sean » 30 Mar 2016, 18:30

Porteus Friends,

I'd like to apologize for not continuing the dialog on this topic. Issues at the mentioned nursing home site are out of my control presently, the computer has been removed. I'm very frustrated, trying to do good, with stop signs at every turn. I will continue as soon, and if possible, which may never be, as ownership is changing. Hoping for better circumstances. (this is a real sore point for me, as I have not been able to use any suggestions made here, and the point of contention is out of my reach, I apologize)

It frustrates me when kind folks, around the world, supply solutions and suggestions, and then I am unable to utilize that contribution of assistance.

Thank you,

Sean

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Re: 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#18 by sean » 28 Aug 2016, 00:46

Back to this old thing.

I've been to the facility twice this week and will be going again tomorrow. The box is running Windows XP Professional and I was able to finally login to Windows. Yesterday I took a stack of Linux Live CD's and 2 Porteus flash drives. There is an interrupt exception somewhere when it tries to boot other than Porteus Linux, usually stops the boot process shortly after the splash screen. With Porteus it never runs init, just hangs as mentioned above. Never got any Linux to boot from CD or Flash Drive.

I did flash the bios to the latest edition with no effects that I could notice.

In "fanthom's" reply, the 2nd reply here, he suggests using the "debug" flag, if I'm using Desktop Porteus, which I am. So which mode do I boot from and how do I enter/use this "debug" flag?

Thanks in advance,

Sean

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brokenman
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Re: 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#19 by brokenman » 28 Aug 2016, 01:57

On standard Porteus then at the boot screen hit the TAB key to access to boot line and add: 3 debug

This will pause the boot at each step and ask you to hit ctrl + D to continue each phase. Then you can see exactly where it fails.
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sean
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Re: 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#20 by sean » 28 Aug 2016, 20:22

Thank you "brokenman" for those instructions, and yes, as has been claimed here by others, you are a genius, al biet a very humble genius, and that's even better !

Now the results after entering the "3 debug" flag after tabbing the boot screen of Porteus, using version 2 and version 3, both LXDE desktops. The following information doesn't even scroll, it seems to be just one screenfull of info that just pops up and sits there. Ctrl + D or hitting the Enter key does nothing. This information is the end of the attempt to boot. A few entries changed as I attempted this multiple times, such as ACPI core revision date and on the last line I got a different number everytime for BogoMIPS (How did bogomips get in there anyway, I thought he was a moderator, not a function? :-) And of course the (timing? numbers) on the left were different with each attempt:

[0.002183] Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
[0.002696] CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0
[0.002815] CPU: Processor Core ID: 0
[0.002933] mce: CPU supports 4 MCE banks
[0.003015] CPU0: Thermal monitoring enabled (TM1)
[0.003149] Last level iTLB entries: 4KB 64, 2MB 64, 4MB 64
[0.003149] Last level dTLB entries: 4KB 64, 2MB 0, 4MB 64
[0.003149] tlb_flushall_shift: 6
[0.007676] ACPI: Core revision 20131115
[0.040581] ACPI: All ACPI Tables successfully acquired
[0.041100] Enabling APIC mode: Flat, Using 1 I/O APICs
[0.041599] ..Timer: vector=0x30 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
[0.057800] smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (fam: 0f, model: 03, stepping: 04)
[0.053000] Performance Events: Netburst events, Netburst P4/Xeon PMU driver.
[0.053000] ... version: 0
[0.053000] ... bit width: 40
[0.053000] ... generic registers: 18
[0.053000] ... value mask: 000000ffffffffff
[0.053000] ...max period: 0000007fffffffff
[0.053000] ... fixed-purpose events: 0
[0.053000] ... event mask: 000000000003ffff
[0.057102] x86: Booted up 1 node, 1 CPUs
]0.057223] smpboot: Total of 1 processors activated (5586.07 BogoMIPS)

That's it. Some other error messages suggest to me that this is a memory issue, although I have done the memory test several times. Please, please, if this info helps Porteus in any way fine. However, I'm thinking this computer is a lost cause, there are millions of other Windows machines dying to be converted to Porteus Linux.

Sean

sean
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Re: [SOLVED] 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#21 by sean » 01 Sep 2016, 23:22

Friends,

Not quite a lost cause afterall. I have found the problem and am marking this thread [SOLVED].

Having been in Set-up dozens of times trying various setting, I had noticed under Memory there was a total of 1.25GB, with 4 modules, 3 of them 256MB and one 512MB. I remembered hearing to always install memory modules in equal pairs. So I removed the 512MB module and one 256MB module.

Problem solved, my Porteus ver 2 and Porteus ver 3 flash drives booted up immediately, along with the Live CD's I had tried earlier.

Now on to removing Windows and installing Linux.

Sean

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[SOLVED] 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#22 by Jack » 27 Nov 2017, 05:07

@Donald,

Hey someone put a password on my wife laptop. It in the bios and it is Set user password do you think this file will work usb140201.zip or cd140201.zip will work? I have a old 512mb USB and can it be install in Linux or what should I use?
I just like Slackware because I think it teach you about Linux to build packages where Ubuntu is like Windows you just install programs you want.

donald
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[SOLVED] 30 miles from home and off the wall

Post#23 by donald » 27 Nov 2017, 07:48

This (very old) tool is to blank the windows password not bios Pw.

I do not understand...
can you enter the bios?
can you boot an OS?

One thing that worked to reset a bios Pw is
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... e48#p41891

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