Just picked-up my RT-686 on eB_ y. Put in a 40gig HDD and tried to load win nt first and got up partistions and the Partistion I have avail. is 7032 MB and nt is 7055MBs and won't install due to room. What I need help wih is: I got a 40gig drive and don't know why nt won't fit. and not to mention, Puppy Linux won't even boot. My machine is rt-686,256 ram 600mhz. Help!? Needed so close so far away!!!??? Tks. in advance...k9 cop needs help with ole cop machine...P.S. I used DBAN to wipe/nuke disk, so HDD is clean.

Just picked-up my RT-686 on eB_ y. Put in a 40gig HDD and tried to load win nt first and got up partistions and the Partistion I have avail. is 7032 MB and nt is 7055MBs and won't install due to room

You'll have to ask a Windows Guy about that.

Puppy Linux won't even boot

What version of Puppy? It booted up and installed fine on mine. The New 4.2 Version of Puppy you might have to use a cheat code because that version is geared toward newer machines than the Amrel. If you haven't already. Burn a Puppy 3.01 ISO. I know that one boots up just fine on these Laptops . So does AntiX 8.0.

By the way. Another Amrel Owner from England (Liam) runs Xubuntu 8.04 on His I think.

On second thought, I coppied this on dvd disk and ran it on my cf-28 Toughbook and it was fine(Puppy-Retro) But tried it on ole RT-686 and I'm think'in dvd won't run,I mean read DVD just CD's, so after work(yeah, I'm at work, so sue me) I get to play more with it and see if that's it. Cause I don't think my Rt-686 Amrel will read this disk???

The New Puppy(4.2) is for i686 architecture. A Amrel Laptop uses i386. That is why I am referring you to some i386 distros. Amrel works ok with Puppy 3.01, and Ubuntu i386. So when choosing a distro. Make sure a i386 version is what you download. You might even get away with i586 even but I don't think i686 will do.

Yeah, and the Panasonic CF-28 has a newer board than the Amrel. I own a CF-48 with a P4 1.4ghz Pentium M, 1 gig ram, 100 gig Hardrive, that I triple boot with Ubuntu 8.04 i386, MoonOS LXDE Kachana (which is based on Ubuntu 9.04), and AntiX 8.2.3 Testing. Still chugs along for a really old Laptop.

Well I'm really sure something is wrong inside the machine due to the fact that I heard a beep sound coming from inside I think.and getting different kinds of warnings and then I changed HDD's after getting secondary slave disk failure Warning and then keeps sending me back to BIOS and now won't even boot from cdrom. All kinds of stuff going on I just don't know where to start now. All this was while I was trying to install NT4 and the machine would tell me that the Partitions were either too small or damaged to be able to install the NT 4 program. I made a cd to install Puppy Linux Retro before all this conegatha started and after messing around with NT4. I'm just guessing that BIOS or something else inside is Forked-up. On a good note though, I don't smell smoke yet! Knock on Wood! Please someone hear my crys of pain and stick a fork in me I'm almost done, I think!? From Frastraighted in Hawaii...

In Amrel bios when you change hardrives or cdrom you need to use the Autodetect

Drive Feature, It is in the bios. This feature enables drives when they are swapped out. Mine don't beep though. I don't like the sound of that. Use the search box on top of forum page and type in Amrel and you will see some posts of mine that deal with taking the laptop apart with pictures. I had to redo the Thermal Interface Material (TIM) on my processor because it was all dried up into a hard paste like jb weld. Maybe that is all that is wrong with yours hopefully. Cost me approx $8.00 to fix myself and it wasn't hard to do. Just had to pull the one 3"x5" approx size panel that has I think 8 screws or so and pry it up (you will see a large brass screw where the northbridge attaches to the aluminum heatsink plate. It attaches the Northbridge. You can unscrew it. Be Gentle and follow all anti-static discharge protocol. Digerati wrote a real good piece on the forum about doing TIM) and clean it up with pure 90% achohol and apply some Artic Silver TIM to all the mating surfaces again. Like I said, I supplied Pictures of this. Just something else to look into later I guess. Do the auto Detect Drive feature first in the Bios for starters and see if that sorts things out first.

I made a cd to install Puppy Linux Retro

By the way. That is a I686 distro and will not boot up your Amrel. Like I said, Use one of the other Puppy Links or Linux links I gave you in the previous posts.

Drinking AND Partying in the Republic of Southwest Texas. HeeeeHaaaaw