Re: Help with Installing Linux on a NEC PC 9821V12 machine.

["SN_Diamond" <Norman.Diamond@example.com>]

Antony Stace wrote:

> I have been trying to install Linux on a NEC PC-9821V12 without
> much success.

I can only give some rough guesses.  Just before new year's, a friend
obtained a working NEC PC-9821CE from the gomi, with Windows 3.1
preinstalled.  I upgraded the hard disk and got Windows 95 onto it, and
learned some things about the old PC-98 architecture in the process, and
only needed 6 hours to get it working.  On the 1.44GB hard disk that I lent
to him, he gets to use two 504MB partitions and the rest is wasted.  He was
lucky to get that, since the real-mode format command (and Windows 3.1
format) get divide-by-zero errors when trying to format a disk that big.
And when I foolishly thought a third partition could be made, the machine
wouldn't even boot from a floppy.  The BIOS inspected the hard disk,
inspected the floppy, started booting, inspected the hard disk again, and
hanged.  Of course that machine couldn't be used to zap the hard disk again,
so I had to move the hard disk to a DOS/V machine and zap it there and move
it back, many times, before getting it into a usable state.

> The machine came with a copy of Japanese Windows 95 on it.

In particular, the NEC-98 version of Japanese Windows 95.  Every Windows
operating system has two Japanese versions.

> While this was on the machine I made a floppy boot disk using Windows 95
> and copied the appropriate drivers onto it to get the CDROM working if I
> needed it.  I then proceeded to format the harddrive.

Yeah, but is it in a format that the BIOS understands...

> After doing this I tried to boot the machine with a boot disk with the
> boot image from a Redhat 6.0 disk, no luck, the machine just spun the
> floppy a few times and then left me with a black screen.

Right, the BIOS doesn't understand the hard drive.  What method did you use
for formatting the hard drive?

I can think of one possibility.  Boot your J-NEC Windows 95 boot floppy and
use FDISK to delete all partitions from the hard drive.  Then try your Linux
floppy again.  If it boots, and then next if it can access your Linux
CD-ROM, then it will try to let you create Linux partitions during
installation.  Otherwise give up and put J-NEC W95 back on it.

> I then tried to boot with a English Windows 95 boot disk, again same
> thing.

No kidding.  There's no NEC-98 version of English Windows operating systems.

Yours sincerely,
Norman Diamond