DeafScribe

>Perhaps the Promise Ultra ATA-66 controller card. That has been the focus of my suspicions too. I knew the CD burner was also a headache, so I pitched it and swapped in another drive that is working much better. But it doesn't resolve the EIP issue. The system BIOS can't handle larger hard drive sizes; thus the addition the Promise controller. It went in together with the 15 gig Maxtor back in '98 or so. The controller card has its own BIOS that apparently overrides the system BIOS, and I've yet to locate a way to get at the card's BIOS settings. Even the manufacturer's site doesn't provide any help. At this point, I'm searching for an updated system BIOS. If I can locate one that will enable support for the larger drive, I could just take out the ATA controller and revert back to system BIOS. This would mean giving up the additional speed the ATA-66 card provides, but since I plan to use the system mainly as a print server, that's not a big problem. BTW - yes, 48 meg is too low for a RAM drive, but a generous swap file will suffice for my purposes. I burned the DSL disk at 16x on a Pocket CD-R rated for 24x. It works fine on other systems. Posted to the DSL forum. Didn't lead to anything useful.

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I'm bumping against the same issue now. I've got an NEC Powermate v133e (Classic Pentium, 133 mHz) with a Polaroid BurnMax32 CD burner, 48 meg memory, and two hard drives, a 15 gig Maxtor and a 1 gig Western Digital. Both are tied to a Promise Ultra ATA-66 controller card. Both have been checked and verified to be error-free. Both drives have been wiped clean, and a 5 gig primary FAT32 partition has been created. The 15 gig Maxtor is primary master, the WDC is primary slave, the CD burner is secondary master. I'm trying to get Damn Small Linux 1.2 installed, but the boot floppy keeps dying with exactly the same Bad EIP value and kernel null pointer error you got. I can get the system to boot from a Win98 floppy, and I can even run an install CD for Win98SE, but I can't get Linux to boot from a CD in the drive (yes, BIOS is configured to check) nor from a floppy. Clues appreciated.