Q: Having looked at various magazines they have no real advice on what PC configuration I should be buying if I want to run such operating systems as Ubuntu 9.04, Open Suse 11.1, Fedora 7, PC Linux OS 2009, etc. At present I have a very old tower PC with a number of separate hard drives each of which contains a separate OS. Some of these hard drives are SCSI whilst others are IDE models. Any new hardware would also need to be able to run Windows 7 on a separate hard drive if I follow my current practice by keeping systems completely separate. I connect to the Internet through a broadband cable modem supplied by Virgin Media, previously NTL.
On my very old PC I have a controller card containing one internal connection and two extra wide SCSI ports to which I can connect a SCSI drive as the only powered drive on the system. I can format and verify this using my Adaptec AHA-2940 U/UW v2.57.2 bios and also write a Linux OS to it where it properly partitions the drive using partition 1 for the OS and partition 5 for the work space. However when I have finished installing an OS such as Ubuntu 7.04 it tells me to reboot which is where the problem arises. I always get the message Operating System Not Found. There is a red light indicator on this card which shows red when the disk is not being accessed and goes out when it is accessed. At the point of re-boot the disk light remains on indicating that the disk has not been accessed to initiate the proper boot sequence. If I repeat this experiment connecting another SCSI drive to the hard drive connection on this card, at the point of re-boot the red light goes out indicating that the disk has been accessed and on the screen I get a message saying that GRUB is being processed in a normal boot sequence which it does OK. Do you have any thoughts on this problem or any software that I could download to fix it?
A: First of all, Windows 7 will be more resource hungry than any of the versions of Linux you’ve mentioned, so it’s best to base your system spec on that. Minimum requirements are available at http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements though if you’re likely to want to use XP mode you need to double the memory and hard disk size from those given.
SCSI systems are a pain, which is why they’ve all but died out other than for server use. The first thing to ensure is that each device in the chain has a valid ID number – usually achieved via jumpers or a small dial or switch block depending on the hardware – and that the last device is properly terminated. The number sequence isn’t important as long as they’re all unique, note that the card itself has an address, probably defaulting to 7, which means you can’t use this for another device. The Adaptec card BIOS should allow you to set a Boot Target ID specifying which SCSI drive number to boot from. Some older 8-bit SCSI drives can cause problems negotiating with 16-bit wide SCSI controllers, so it’s worth setting Initiate Wide Negotiation to no to see if that helps. If you can boot from a live CD version of Linux try running lspci from a command console to verify that the card is being detected properly. We’d also try a newer version of Ubuntu, since a look around the Web forums indicates that earlier Linux kernels seem to have had particular problems addressing AHA-2940 controllers.
A system capable of running Windows 7 should have no problems with Linux
Originally featured in PCU116
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Toshiba L500D , Windows7 Home Premium.
There are a few things you can help me with.
Windows 7 refused to boot recently ,took3-4 hours to get back working! So i thought i’d try one of the Linux OS on the cover disc, all i got was stall, error 31 stall,cannot open!
What is going on guys??
Any help or ideas would be welcome.
Error 31 is telling you that you don’t have anything installed which understands the file type.
Linux distros are normally in the form of an ISO file that needs to be burned to CD before use. Windows 7 should recognise and burn ISOs automatically, otherwise there should be a suitable burning tool elsewhere on the cover disc or download Active@ ISO Burner from http://www.ntfs.com/iso-burning.htm