Hi,

I have been kindly donated a Tosh Satellite 1700-300 by a friend. It had a dodgy DVD drive which wouldnt read at all so I have replaced it with a new CD-Rom drive.

Currently the laptop is running on its original Windowz ME . The CD drive I have put in works fine and reads discs without a problem.

However, I want to put Linux on this beast. I tried to boot Knoppix from a live CD and it wont do it. It briefly trys to read the disc, then boots into ME.

I have tried booting from a genuine windows boot disc and that does the same thing. It will boot from a floppy however.

It has USB but I'm not sure if it will boot from a removable device.

Could anyone tell me how I might get linux on to this laptop?

Thank you in advance,

Marcus

Is the BIOS set to boot from the CDROM drive first?

I've done that and also used the 'force CD-boot' command in the POST.

Is there a way of initiallising the linux installation using floppy disks?

I know you are requesting SUSE, but why not try out Mandriva via. ftp installation? This will at least give you a Linux distro up and running on the machine for the time being.

Go to Mandriva's website and download the two floppy network images, then during installation, tell it you want to use the FTP installation. The rest should go without a hitch.

Deion "Mule" Christopher

This would be ideal but the Toshiba Satellite 1700-300 has no ethernet port. Is it possible to install Mandriva in this way using a PCMCIA Network Card or would it require drivers?

Ta,
Marcus

For a CD boot, try holding the "C" key down during the boot sequence.
Works for my old Sat-Pro 4600 - maybe for yours, maybe not.

Mandriva is pretty good at picking out your hardware (at least since 10.1). PCMCIA shouldn't be a problem. However, I have run into problems with other distro's not wanting to run on laptops unless I gave as a boot option noscsi, and such commands...

Now if you go wireless pcmcia, be careful of what brand you use. I use Linksys (broadcomm), and it requires me to use ndiswrappers (uses the Windows XP drivers inside Linux) to get it to work - and it works well.

Now if you are feeling hard-core, you could purchase for $20+ one of those IDE-2-USB adapters. You could then copy the entire contents of the Mandriva/SUSE DVD/CD's onto a spare PC hard drive, then plug that puppy into your laptop via USB and see if you can install that way...

Good luck,

Deion "Mule" Christopher