Booting a Hitachi Microdrive on an HP Omnibook 6000

xmrkite · 07-20-2009, 11:37 AM

Hello. I have a couple of laptops and a couple of hitachi microdrives.

These drives boot up great and work nice for me, except with my hp omnibook 6000. For some reason it just won't boot the drives. I know the drives are good as i use them in other laptops and they work great.

Any ideas on why it won't boot it?

I'm using the 4GB hitachi microdrives, and i have an 800mhz omnibook 6000.

-Thanks for any help.

linus72 · 07-20-2009, 12:30 PM

And your sure the omnibook can boot usb/microdrive??

If no, have you tried any bootmanagers?

how are the micro(s) booted?
syslinux or grub or what?

xmrkite · 07-20-2009, 12:32 PM

Ok, here is the ironic part. I had this same computer boot a microdrive about 2 years ago and i lost the bios settings required to boot it. (lba mode, 32 bit i/o, transfer mode, etc). So i know it can do it.

I'm using grub on the drive i want to boot.

-Thanks
-xmrkite

linus72 · 07-20-2009, 12:48 PM

Does it list like hd group in the bios?
what is the booting order of the bios?

with grub it should be easy

when you installed grub to usb
what did you designate it as?
(hd1,0) or (hd0,0)?

xmrkite · 07-20-2009, 01:08 PM

Ok, your 1,0 or 0,0 comment got me thinking. It should be 0,0 and also here are the settings you need (incase anyone else has this probelm:

Type: user
cylinders: 7936
heads: 16
multi-sector transfers: 16 sectors
lba mode control: enabled
32 bit i/o: disabled
transfer mode: fast pio 4
ultra dma mode: disabled

-Thanks for all the help. This really was a headache.

linus72 · 07-20-2009, 01:13 PM

Damn, what's all that?

Quote:

Type: user
cylinders: 7936
heads: 16
multi-sector transfers: 16 sectors
lba mode control: enabled
32 bit i/o: disabled
transfer mode: fast pio 4
ultra dma mode: disabled

what is that?
a bios setting?

so, are you up and running?
How many distro's you got on there?

xmrkite · 07-20-2009, 01:34 PM

Ya, that is the bios setting. Auto detect doesn't work for this drive in this computer for some reason so you have to specify the hard drive manually. Keep in mind that this is only for the microdrive. Hard drives boot up fine.

I'm just running antix on this thing and yes, I'm not up and running. --Thanks

linus72 · 07-20-2009, 01:39 PM

How big is the microdrives?

what distro's you like, Ubuntu?
have you checked out ultimate edition 2.2 (9.04)

xmrkite · 07-20-2009, 02:18 PM

The microdrive is only 4gb. Ubuntu is way to slow on this old laptop. I do use ubuntu on my newer computers though.