Old old old chipset.. Incompatible?

[Davide]

Hi I'm attemping to Plop-boot a 1998 asus off usb flash.
Plop's on a floppy loads debian in the flashdrive, thru grub in it's mbr.
It hangs crashes always at grub shall, while I set the kernel by "kernel /boot/xxx root=/xxx .."
grub takes this command, then nothing... a loop-blinking cursor rests right the line below my command, so no output at all (and no more input).

On another motherboard the same pen (and same data inside) can boot properly, with plop on floppy just as the other one. (ok not so properly i get a kernel panic but maybe it's because it's a 2.4 kernel on a quiet new machine..)

So believe this special '98 fashion machine is not supported, maybe for chipset I/O incompatibilities.
It's an amazing computer I modded.. a pentium 3 coppermine 500 mhz 256 mb ram, no harddisk, no fans, no noises at all... the so thinly buzzing coils in power supply have got quieted...
You cant imagine the value of this machine.... eheh I joke

[Elmar]

hi,
can you test to use syslinux or lilo instead of grub?

best regards
elmar

[Davide]

I'm sorry for myself i'm not living at home anymore and came back every 2 weeks with no time for pc (unfair!)..
Hope will have enough to set up this wonderful pc and take it away with me! ..

A mounth ago i attempted to boot thru syslinux.
Succesfully passed the bootloader phase, while grub used to crash at it's shall, but got always stucked decompressing the kernel. don't remember exactly.

I don't know why, but syslinux actually boots a little more.