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Ast0r
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Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 404
Location: Dallas, Tx - USA
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 Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 6:17 am Post subject: Compaq Presario 1500 Laptop w/broken CD-ROM drive [solved]? |
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My room-mate needs a computer and fast. He has a Presario 1500 laptop on which Windows is all screwed up, so I suggested that we install Linux and he would be set. However, the CD-ROM drive fails to boot *any* CD. It sounds like it's trying to spin the disk up but is failing.
So, I decided to see if I could boot from a USB thumb drive which I had installed Linux on some time back, to no avail. It appears that it has no method for booting a USB device (the BIOS options are very limited). So I am at somewhat of an impass and I do not know how to proceed. There is a floppy drive which I assume works and it appear to have the ability to do a network boot, so I am assuming that these are my two options for getting the laptop working.
Option one seems kind of crappy, but if need be I have tons of floppies and can do that, but I'd need to know how to get a working environment that I can install from with just floppies.
Option two seems ok I guess. I have a machine running Gentoo (mine) which I could set up to do network boots, but again I don't know how to do it.
There is also option three, which is remove the hard drive and hook it up to another computer for the install. The hard drive is very easy to remove (it slides right out the bottom with the removal of one screw) but I'm not sure how to hook it up to my computer, because the interface does not appear to be a standard IDE interface.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?
EDIT: 2 1/2 hours later, I am starting an install, using the follow images available here: http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~giannone/rescue/current/
It took forever to find any good information and I ended up writing about 20 floppy images before I was successful. This set of floppy images seems to have decent support though. I will report back when/if I complete my install.
EDIT2: Another hour later I am trying to chroot after I downloaded and extracted the portage and base system tarballs, but I get the cryptic error | Code: | | FATAL: kernel too old |
I'm guessing I need a boot disk with a newer kernel? This is driving me crazy; there has to be a boot disk out there with a kernel that works and which is easy enough to boot that you don't have to know some black magic words to invoke in order to get it to boot.
Last edited by Ast0r on Sat Sep 30, 2006 3:22 am; edited 1 time in total |
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cyrillic
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Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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I would probably go with option 3 since laptop harddrives are pretty standard.
If you want to plug the laptop harddrive into a desktop machine, then you will need a $10 adapter to make the connectors match. |
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Ast0r
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Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 404
Location: Dallas, Tx - USA
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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| cyrillic wrote: | I would probably go with option 3 since laptop harddrives are pretty standard.
If you want to plug the laptop harddrive into a desktop machine, then you will need a $10 adapter to make the connectors match. |
What's it called? |
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cyrillic
Watchman
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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Ast0r
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Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 404
Location: Dallas, Tx - USA
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2006 8:40 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks, I found it on newegg.com. 
I'd really like to avoid spending money on this if at all possible though. Why aren't there any boot disks with 2.6 kernels? |
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cyrillic
Watchman
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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| Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 1:50 am Post subject: |
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| Ast0r wrote: | | Why aren't there any boot disks with 2.6 kernels? |
If you have another machine running Linux, it should be fairly easy to make your own boot disk.
The real challenge is to configure a lean enough 2.6 kernel so it can actually fit on a floppy. |
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Ast0r
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Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 404
Location: Dallas, Tx - USA
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| Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 3:20 am Post subject: |
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| cyrillic wrote: | | Ast0r wrote: | | Why aren't there any boot disks with 2.6 kernels? |
If you have another machine running Linux, it should be fairly easy to make your own boot disk.
The real challenge is to configure a lean enough 2.6 kernel so it can actually fit on a floppy. |
Well, I tried a few different things, all without any real success. I tried using utility included in Knoppix 4.0 to create a set of two bootable floppies and it kept saying it failed (maybe the floppies I have are trash, I dunno, but I tried like 10). I also tried following a howto from Knoppix on creating a boot disk using included mini roots and kernels, and was unable to get the 2.6 kernel to fit on a 1.44MB floppy.
Finally I tried building my own kernel and using that instead of the knoppix one since it wouldn't fit and the system *almost* booted, but it got stuck at some step of booting the initrd and I became disgusted and gave up.
Today I went to Fry's and picked up the adaptor and I'm syncing portage from within the chroot right now. Apparently it's all-but impossible to boot a working 2.6 kernel from floppies and have a system that you can use to install Gentoo. |
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Installing Gentoo
