On 09/28/2010 12:39 PM, Mark Misulich wrote:
On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 15:26 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/09/28 14:57 (GMT-0400) Mark Misulich composed:
One of the laptops has no internal cd drive, and won't boot from the external cd drive.
Maybe both are Intel-chipped (most common old laptop chipsets), and you could do a minimal install on this laptop's HD by temporarily installing it in the other after figuring out how to install there.
The other laptop has an internal cd drive, but won't boot from the install dvd. I am not sure why.
The answer is in your own words. :-) If the internal drive were able to read DVDs it would be called a DVD drive, not a CD drive. ;-)
Neither laptop has an operating system installed. Making more cd's won't help, the laptops won't boot from them.
Unusual that an old laptop with a CD drive but lacking a floppy drive cannot be booted from a CD. Not unusual at all that a laptop BIOS must be changed to enable booting from the CD drive in preference to the HD, which is the more typical way to install an OS on such laptops. Assuming the CD drive is not broken if burning http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/iso/openSUSE-11.3-NET-i586.is... and booting it would not work after a necessary BIOS adjustment and CD drive cleaning I'd be surprised. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/
Hi Felix, thanks for the reply. The drives actually are dvd drives, I should have been more correct in my terminology.
One laptop won't boot from the external drive.
The other won't boot from the 11.1, 2, or 3 install dvd's. It won't boot from Xubuntu 9 or 10 install cd's. It won't boot from EliveCD install cd. Both Xubuntu and EliveCD install cd's are live cd's, perhaps that is why they won't boot from them. It will boot from the PCBSD install DVD, but the graphic's driver is wrong and the screen won't display properly. I don't really want to put that on there anyways, or I would play around with the driver.
I thought the easiest thing would be to do the net install starting with tftp. After all, the polish guy that wrote that article said it was easy.
It actually is easy once you get the hang of setting up PXE. Below I've included part of my PXE default file. It lives in /tftpboot/pxeboot.cfg. /tftpboot/suse/11.3 contains the files linux and initrd taken from http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/repo/oss/boot/i386/loader/ default install-11.3-32 prompt 1 timeout 3000 # Install 32 bit i386 Linux 11.3 label install-11.3-32 kernel suse/11.3/linux append initrd=suse/11.3/initrd splash=silent vga=0x314 showopts install=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/repo/oss good luck! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org