[vox] Dead Computer

[Richard S. Crawford]

I have an ancient P-II 350MHz PC (192 MB RAM and 6GB HD) which I inherited 
from a friend of mine.  It had an old installation of Win98 on it, and I was 
planning on fixing that and installing Debian on it.  It was set to boot from 
the hard disk, though, so I entered Setup and changed the boot sequence to 
boot from the CD-ROM and stuck the Debian disk in.  Unfortunately, it did not 
boot: instead it gave me an error telling me about invalid boot media.  And 
now I believe I have killed the boot loader or something, because if I set 
the device to boot from either the hard drive or the CD-ROM, I get the same 
error.  I set it to floppy and used Tom's Root Boot to fdisk the hard drive, 
hoping to flag the hda1 partition as bootable, and then go from there, but 
that didn't work out either.

The CD drive is actually a DVD/CD drive, but I do not have the installation 
disk that came with it.

So.  What to do?  I'm thinking about just dumping this computer on someone 
else, because it doesn't meet any of my own needs and I'm hesitant to spend a 
lot of time on it.  I figure it would make a dandy router or firewall, 
though, if someone wanted to take the time to fix up the boot sequence.

-- 
Richard S. Crawford (mailto: rscrawford at mossroot.com)
AIM: Buffalo2K / http://www.mossroot.com
"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus."
-Mark Twain