Dead Packard Bell -Linux blamed (a tad long)

["dmann" <dmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    I just recently went over to a friends house who was running win95 on
his 133 PBell.  he got the machine used, isn't real familiar with computers,
yada yada yada, and he started having some probs with the registry .  I told
him to see if he could restore the registry.  He tried and couldn't.
needless to say, he had the packard bell master restore disk and decided to
just do a restore.  Well, I don't think he realized that he was going to
lose everything in the process. any how, he did the master restore, and
called me up and told me that he was still getting errors, but this time
different ones.  He has seen linux running on my machine, and said he wanted
to try it on his.  I told him that since he had already lost all of the
stuff he had, he might as well just partition the drive for linux and win,
reinstall win and install linux, two birds with one stone, you know?  So I
go over to his place with my recent version of BS ware, and install
absolutely no probs.  he says "don't even bother with putting windows back
on man... I wanna learn this" but the guy goes online through aol and I
don't know how that goes with linux.  So I told him that we would just
reinstall win also.  So we do. and we got the same errors as before.
packard bell can't just make it easy to do the install, they have to have
all this proprietary software, which you have very little control over, so I
tell him lets just install 95 off of a microsoft disk.  well, he says he'll
get one...but in the mean time, lets try the master restore from his sisters
PBell, a bit newer machine, maybe it'll work.  so off he goes, putting this
new pb stuff on, and when it gets to the windows part it hangs.  I hit the
reset button, and wait for the machine to boot off of the floppy, which it
does, but now it says it can't find a cdrom device. So, I get dropped to a
dos prompt, and try to see how much got loaded on the harddrive before it
quit.  Invalid drive is what I get.  I know that the PBell software just
formatted the thing, I watched it.  So I go to do a dos fdisk, and I get the
response "no fixed disks present" and I think 'Oh CRAP!'.
so I put in the linux install bootable, because linux found all the hardware
the first time just fine.  Linux gets to the point where it normally tells
you to insert the cdrom but instead says 'scsi or other cdrom ?'.  It was
just there like 1 hour ago.  we never took the case off! I go into bios and
I get 'not installed' for the primary and secondary IDE bus.  Hmmmm....any
clues on this part anyone?  bios was set on auto configure...

So, we take the computer to school, and talk to the guys taking the A+ cert
class and our instructors.  The first thing they said was
"what are you doing installing linux on a packard bell?!"  "that probably
messed it up".  I said NO WAY linux was working fine, infact I had xwindows
running and the modem configured and dialing in half the time it took to get
windows on in the first place.

next step, they say "packard bells have a serial number on the disk and if
you partitioned it you erased it"  and "you probably need to do a low level
format". To which I respond "how are you going to do a low level format on a
drive that the computer can't find?". I know that the hardware has to have
some kind of built in identification, because when linux boots it even tells
you what brand and model # you stuff is.  We're not even getting this out of
the machine now.

Well, we pulled the drive out and put it in another machine, and there was
the windows partion, with a mostly installed system, I think even bootable,
just missing some drivers.

Now, everyone want's to just blame linux.  Any ideas here?  Was this a
coincidental hardware failure? or possibly software induced?  the system
will still boot, but has no ide devices working.  Could this be a bios
problem, even though the computer boots and It'll go into bios configure?

My whole point all along was that linux installed on this system with no
snags whatsoever.  windows was absolutley plagued.  I need a witch doctor to
get windows installed.

sorry so long, but I am getting tired of folks ragging on linux-
(credit where credit is due, you know?)


Dan