Amithlon on HP Laptop

[spaceman88]

So I put my Amithlon CD in one of the HP 6730b laptops that I sell and much to my surprise the boing ball bounced around a few things then rebooted into Workbench. I went to OS 3.9 install and things seemed to work until I tried to find the hard drive. The window showed CD0: , HDH0: and RAM: as well as a bunch of , none of which is the laptop HD. Is this because it has a SATA drive? The specs are 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 160 GB HD, 4 GB RAM.

[spaceman88]

I am curios. Did you make your fat16 file system and the file system for which you will put Amithlon?
I have an Amithlon blog, it may help you.

Had a look at your blog......looks like I need to do some more work :-(.  Thanks.

[spaceman88]

Amithlon has a habit of puking on SATA devices/chipsets.  My own Amithlon box will install and run for a bit on the onboard SATA on the mobo, then it packs it up and refuses to work.

It's an older machine, so I still have PATA/IDE onboard, the last of my machines to have an IDE port, sadly.  IDE works 100% on said machine with Amithlon.

You running the latest kernel?

I think it's the latest, I downloaded it a couple of months ago and have been trying it in every computer I come across. This was the first one the boing ball didn't freeze or something. Maybe I should sell this and look for an IDE setup. I can take a laptop apart and repair it but software setups for odd OS's is not my strong point. Looking at some of the guides, I'm starting to think this may be beyond me......

[spaceman88]

Interesting, you have 4 GB ram and Amithlon booted off the CD?  I've never been able to get Amithlon to boot on a system with more than 1 GB except for a Virtualbox setup I did with different memory settings (2 GB, 3 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB) and using the mem= statement in the linux boot config for Amithlon (small or amithlon).

Also, if possible, build another Amithlon CD but replace emubox.gz with kernel 3.10 and edit the config files to reference the new kernel in place of emubox.gz.  I've had varying degrees of luck with SATA drives.  Also check your BIOS settings and see if the SATA controller has a "legacy" mode or "IDE" mode and set it to that.  If that lets you see the drive you can start creating the DOS boot partition and Amiga virtual drive.

Yes, it booted right up. I don't have that laptop anymore, but I think there's another one coming in my next shipment in a couple of weeks. Not sure what kernel version I was using. I should dig out the disk and try it on the new laptop and see if I can get any further than last time.

[spaceman88]

OK, I got 2 more of these laptops, this time I didn't even get the bouncing ball, just the word "Amithlon" then a blank screen. I took out some RAM (left 512 mb) and I got the ball back then something about 68040, then Phase 5 emulator crash!! So now I have no idea, I was sure I had it running from the CD on this model. So I guess you better leave it off your compatiblilty list :-(.