[ltp] insalling Linux on old thinkpads...

[Vasanth Rakasi]

I am trying to install RedHat Linux 6.1 on old,
Pentium-based IBM thinkpads--models 365E and 755CX.
Niether of these has a a CD-ROM drive. Both of them,
however, have floppy disk drives. The hard disk space
on both the ThinkPads is 540MB and and is wiped clean
with Partition Magic. Each of them has 8MB RAM.

I am trying the installation through nfs, running on
another desktop PC (which has a CD-ROM drive and)
running RedHat Linux 6.1. I am able to connect the
ThinkPads to the network using an NE2000 compatible
PCMCIA card. 

I'm  using RedHat 6.1's pcmcia.img and
gdth-driver-disk.img which I got from RedHat's site
and used rawrite.exe to copy on to floppy diskettes.
With the help of these two ".img" files, I'm able to
get to the point where I need to select an
installation method--NFS.

(at this point, when I ping this machine from another
machine, I do get a response--showing that the network
card is working OK. I can hear the spinning of CD-ROM
on the desktop PC in response to the installation on
the thinkpads.)

Installation, however, fails with the following error
(let's call it error_1):
-------------------
install exited abnormally -- received signal 7
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
unmounting filesystems...
                /mnt/source
                /dev/pts
                /proc
you may safely reboot your system
-------------------

When I try to get to "bash#" during the installation
procedure (by temporarily not answering the questions
asked by the installaion program), I tried "fdisk
/dev/hda", "fdisk /dev/sda" and "fdisk /dev/eda" only
to see "Unable to open /dev/hda",
"Unable to open /dev/sda", etc. 

I When I do "ls /dev", the following is what I see:
-------------------
console mem             ptmx    tty0    tty3    tty6  
 ttyS1   zero
log     null    pts     tty1    tty4    tty7    ttyS2
md0     psaux   ram     tty2    tty5    ttyS0   ttyS3
-------------------
I don't see hda, sda or eda. 

Somebody on the linux thinkpad newsgroup suggested I
use "mknod" to get "/dev/hda", "fdisk"
to create linux and swap partitions /dev/hda1 and
/dev/hda2 respectively. Even after I do this, I still
get the same error (error_1 above).

Any help from you would be deeply appreciated.

vasanth
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