Rafe, this may not be the answer, but I'd try it anyway. Got into the CMOS of the 'puter and make the FIRST bootable device the DVD, if you can. Since it's a USB, you may have to disable the floppy to force the 'puter to see the DVD first.
Fred
No on this machine, IBM Thinkpad Transnote, one can never boot from the cdrom. Only the usb floppy - wierd I know. Thanks to everyone who gave this problem any thought at all. The solution is . . . ftp the SUSE 9.1 boot and module disks Boot from said disks only have the suse 9.3 cd in the cdrom drive. It is going a little slow, but it is installing away as I write. I tried the bootdisk from 9.3 on three other computers and they don't seem to work on anything. If all my hardware is that picky then something is still wrong. I used linux back when slackware was the only game in town. I also used SUSE a lot back around 6.5, but switched away because of work. Must admit I almost gave up on this and went with debian. Not that there is anything wrong with either, I just wanted to give SUSE a try again and I am glad to say it looks like I am going to get my chance. My Mandrake 9.2 box will become a debian box in a couple months. First I have to figure out how to replace caps on the mother board - it is always something. Rafe
Rafe wrote:
Rafe, this may not be the answer, but I'd try it anyway. Got into the CMOS of the 'puter and make the FIRST bootable device the DVD, if you can. Since it's a USB, you may have to disable the floppy to force the 'puter to see the DVD first.
Fred
No on this machine, IBM Thinkpad Transnote, one can never boot from the cdrom. Only the usb floppy - wierd I know.
Early CDROM's were not bootable. I was told this years ago when I wondered why I couldn't boot SuSE 6.1 on an old Fuji laptop. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks
wierd I know.
Early CDROM's were not bootable. I was told this years ago when I wondered why I couldn't boot SuSE 6.1 on an old Fuji laptop. Regards Sid.
I found it very strange that a usb floppy could boot, but not a usb cdrom. Most of the time you can boot from usb or not. Plus this laptop is not old enough to have this limit. Bootable cdroms look a lot like floppies to the hardware. I am not sure why the hardware cannot be fooled into booting from the cdrom. I also think that a very small change in the system bios would fix this -- but I guess not. I have an ancient pI box that after a bios update now boots from cdrom. You would think that a pIII box would. Rafe
Rafe wrote:
wierd I know.
Early CDROM's were not bootable. I was told this years ago when I wondered why I couldn't boot SuSE 6.1 on an old Fuji laptop. Regards Sid.
I found it very strange that a usb floppy could boot, but not a usb cdrom. Most of the time you can boot from usb or not. Plus this laptop is not old enough to have this limit.
Bootable cdroms look a lot like floppies to the hardware. I am not sure why the hardware cannot be fooled into booting from the cdrom.
I also think that a very small change in the system bios would fix this -- but I guess not. I have an ancient pI box that after a bios update now boots from cdrom. You would think that a pIII box would.
Rafe
I would also expect a P-III to be able to bot from CDROM, my old laptop is a P-II/333 64M + 2M video and 20G HD, it booted from cdrom and installed 9.3 in non-graphical mode due to the low memory, but X works fine with Windowmaker and all small window managers, KDE is tooooooo slow, if you move the cursor, it'll take an age for anything to happen, but YaST performs OK under Windowmaker or fvwm. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks
I do not use floppies to install, but I am wondering if the message you are getting is incorrect. The message you see is for bad media, and you have determined that the media is probably not bad. When you get that message, what happens when you put in disk 2? James W
--- James Wright
I do not use floppies to install, but I am wondering if the message you are getting is incorrect. The message you see is for bad media, and you have determined that the media is probably not bad. When you get that message, what happens when you put in disk 2?
James W
First thing I tried. Nothing happens when you press a key . . . But the boot disk from 9.1 work fine. Rafe
participants (3)
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James Wright -
Rafe -
Sid Boyce