How to get Puppy to work with OnTrack Disc Manager?

[sindi]

The laptop is a 1999 Thinkpad 600E Pentium II 600MHz 288MB PC100 memory.
Until it suddenly stopped doing so, it was booting Lupu 525 and Pulp (4.1.2)
linux from boot CDs. I then also tried:

Turbopup (4.1.2)
Puppy 4.3.1 (I think with kernel 2.6.25 and 2.6.30)
Lucid Puppy 5.10, 5.11, 5.2.8.6 mini
Slacko 5.7
Tahr requires more RAM so I skipped it.
I did not try puppies 1, 2 or 3.

Some of them would simply reboot, some would not find .sfs file or
puppy files on disk, or would not uncompress.

A DOS boot CD boots. A win98 hard disk from another PII boots to
the point where itasks whether to start windows normally,
then reboots if I say yes. Or to start in safe mode.

I plugged in an external floppy drive to the proprietary port (from
a Thinkpad 1770E 266MHz). It booted to DOS. It did NOT boot all the
way to a single-floppy USB-capable Basiclinux floppy. I forget the
exact error message. That linux also comes as a compressed file plus
initrd.gz and a kernel. The problem appears to be uncompressing.

ALL of these worked in other computers including the BL floppy disk
(booted from USB floppy drive).

Trinity Rescue Kit CD (Isolinux I think) booted perfectly.

I have not yet tried a hard disk to which I installed Puppy
in another computer. It takes a while to change disks since
I had to adapt the caddy for a 9mm from 12mm.

Or run memtest from floppy disk in case one of the 128MB
PC100's went bad when I removed it to repair the CMOS battery.

Maybe after taxes....

I have offered this laptop to a friend who likes 'boxy' old
laptops to play old DOS games. The last one I gave him will not
boot DOS from hard disk, CD-ROM or floppy disk but plays CDs.

[sindi]

Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4 claims to include memtest but does not seem to.

Memtest86 booted from external floppy drive passed.

The Windows on the 6GB drive is not Win98 but XP
(from a failed 1999 HP laptop where no drives boot).

MicroXP 2008 would not install. Fatal error. Some component would not install.

Win98SE would not install. Blue screen. SYSTEM_LICENSE_VIOLATION.
(Is it fussy about which version you have?).

They both booted and MicroXP even reformatted the hard disk to FAT.

I have not tried Win95.

This might be a good computer for old DOS games.

[sindi]

I had Lupu2016 installed on a hard drive taken from a laptop
that died. Lupu2016 just booted perfectly on the 600E.

So the problem seems to involve uncompressing files from
CD and floppy. Very strange. Or else Lupu2016 is very different
from puppies 4.1.2, 4.1.3, 5.1.0, 5.2.5, 5.2.8.6, 5.7.

I don't have it on CD just USB flash drive, which this laptop
cannot boot (though it might with the correct boot floppy).

This hard drive has a bad boot sector (which is why I was given
the other laptop, that failed for other reasons) but boots
linux though not DOS. I doubt that is related.

Puppy tells me to use CS4236 for 600E or 770E (whence the floppy
drive), ISA, then cannot find any legacy cards.

ALSA sound does not work on this 600E nor (says puppy discussion)
on 770X, T43p, T60, all of which I have (plus T23).

The "newer kernels" do not support the chip properly.

You need to force activation with a command that comes with a
puppy dotpet. It blacklists cs4236. And not run alsaconfig.
"Audio Fix for Old Thinkpads".

Pulp might work better for sound (installed via USB flash drive?)
but Lupu works with youtube-viewer, which uses little RAM.

I have watched Youtube on a 233MHz Thinkpad with 96MB EDO RAM,
using youtube-dl or movgrab then mplayer. 240p maybe 360p.

Tax time.

[Smithy]

Yes I was going to suggest taking out the ram, cleaning the gold contacts with a pencil rubber, blowing out the slots and cleaning the power fan, then trying a stick at a time (if two) or putting a known good stick in.
I did bring an old lappie up to blistering performance for a friend who kept two cute fluffy bunnies and the air intake was blocked solid!

But maybe pick up a nice little IBM that's not been abused pretty cheap.
Good luck with it Sindi.

[sindi]

I am online with the thinkpad
600e (which i discovered has
not just a bad left shift but
also a bad f2 and f7 so i use
chvt 7 instead of
ctrl-alt-f7). the gigafast
wifi card appears to receive
but not transmit using
ndiswrapper files. it used to
work.
the forum instructions for the
600e are for puppy 4, but it
did help to put pnpbios=off in
menu.list after pfix= and
vga=791 (which givesme fb
console after i also modprobe
fbcon in rc.local). now
alsaconf goes straight to isa
'legacy sound', skipping pci.

the instructions say not to
run alsaconf but i already did
and that may have blacklisted
cs4236.
now puppy cannot find any
legacy modules. there is no
/etc/modprobe.conf. what file
do i edit to unblacklist
cs4236?
these laptops apparently have
two sound chips, one of which
is used for dos games.

sound might work in pulp but
yt-viewer will not.
the screen is lovely though a
bit dim. i pulled down the
shade. ideal for plain text in
a framebuffer console vga=791.

the little plastic cover over
the serial port had a rubber
hinge which disintegrated so
we taped the cover on. the
cover over the parallel port
was lost before the laptop
arrived here. the rest still
works apart from not booting
linux from cd or fd. there is
even some main battery life.

[sindi]

sorry about the formatting, done with lynx. now using e3pi.
palemoon compiled with sse support for p iii does not work.
opera 12 and firefox 45 esr do work, slowly.
yt-viewer pet works at 240p without sound, 83% cpu including
cde-exec and firewallstate. 360p would be too much.
tab key also dead. would cleaning or reseating cable help?
thanks for all the suggestions and encouragement.
someone had the same sound problem on 600e with wary 5.5.
i am enjoying the keyboard except for the bad keys.