I want to install linux or freebsd on this computer. I took out the (dead) 102 MB hdd and replaced it with an old Quantum fireball I had. The drive is 540 MB with 1049 cycles, 16 heads, and 63 sectors. I couldn't find settings for pre comp or landing zone so I put -1 (none) for these. When I try to boot off a stardard boot disk, the partition software reports 12 cycles, 16 heads, 63 sectors for a 12 MB hard disk. What can I do about this. I know it is becasue the bios lacks LBA support, among other thing. Is their a solution. I heard I can use boot disks and disable the HDD in the BIOS. If so, how is this done? Thanks

By "the partition software" you mean Linux fdisk, right? Linux bypasses the BIOS for disk access, so it really shouldn't be a problem. If you're trying to fdisk from DOS, don't bother because you're just going to have to redo it when you install Linux.

You can set the C/H/S for drives in fdisk (I don't know about the DOS one though).

OK But what distro should I use on this old PC. Some say use Debian others tell me Freebsd. I currently use RH 9, but this hard drive is way too small for it.

Debian, Slackware and FreeBSD (which isn't strictly speaking a linux distro...) should all be fine. There are others like tiny linux, peanut etc which are designed for small footprints. Here are a couple of sites you may want to check: Linux For Old PCs www.volny.cz/basiclinux/oldpc/ Distrowatch www.distrowatch.com Personally I would recommend slackware....just because it's my current favourite flavour!=o)

By the way, is slackware any good on overclocked pentium IIs with 128 MB ram and 20 GB HDD?

At home I run slack on a 464MHz PII (clocked) and a 450 K6III....both of which are great. OK, so I have at least 1/2Gb of RAM in each but I find slackware to be powerful yet simple and not cluttered up with junk. And most things just seem to work (USB camera, joystick etc) which I may have had trouble with in other distros. I also run slack on my work box (2.4GHz P4)....so I'd say I've pretty much been converted!=o) BTW 20Gb hard drive should easily be enough, unless you want to start ripping DVDs etc....and in my opinion you can never have enough memory - too much of a good thing can be wonderful!