Hi folks,

I have an old Toshiba Portege R100, which I am very keen on using as a daily business laptop as it's very thin, and light. As it's somewhat old I want to make the best out of it by installing some lightweight distro. However I have had a couple of problems...

First of I'd like to mention that I have successfully run Ubuntu and SUSE on this laptop before, and I am not completely oblivious to the linux world. That being said, I'm pretty much clueless on how to tackle the problems I am facing now:

I have decided to install puppy linux v4.3.1, which booted fine for the first time through the pcmcia cd-rom I have (the laptop doesn't have a built-in optical drive). Somehow I managed to mess up the partition table (i think) during installation, I wanted to wipe out everything, and create a much simpler partition table.. So after that it just wouldn't boot anymore.

When I boot with the Puppy cd, the following happens:

and it leaves me with a command prompt. I have tried to run the boot with the "run from RAM" parameter, without any luck. Actually I have tried any and all relevant parameters, still no progress..I have been browsing for many hours now and among the things I found was the following tip from some guy in PL forums: apparently "./init" should restart the boot process, it does only to get stuck again:

..and I am left with the prompt again

In this prompt simple unix commands like "ls" or "cd" works, but other than that not much else... Just to try out something else I burned AntiX which also crashed during the initial boot, and similarly suSE failed to boot as well.

Annoyingly I dl:ed and burned System Rescue CD, which boots, and I can check the hdd with mhdd and repartition with ranish. but still when I try to boot with Puppy or AntiX or SUSE nothing new happens.. When i try a normal boot with the Rescue CD it loads a load of modules, but it can't find anything to boot from, I have realized that the pcmcia cd-rom is turned off at this stage, so no wonder it can't find anything to boot with..

Any tips? It's really annoying and I want to be able to understand what the problem is...

Thanks a big bunch in advance,

I would try using Gparted in either Slax, Debian-Live or similar instead of ranish,etc

Puppy's gparted sometimes goes twiggy, I have noticed this before

does it have a usb port?

yes, it does have a couple of USB ports, however the BIOS doesn't support booting from USB. Would have been such a relief if it could... :S

I believe it can

I use Plop bootmanager (plpbt) to boot usb,usb-cdrom,etc on computers that dont have bios support.
yep
I also include plpbt in almost all my downloads too

I have a Toshiba 7000CT, 1 usb port
but wont boot from usb
and plop does it well

Now, does it also have a floppy drive too?
as Plop works 2 ways, 1 is plpbt, which just boots the usb,etc
the otyher is plpbtin(.img) and it installs to MBR and works as a bootmanager
it gets overwritten when you install grub/lilo so its cool/temporary

you can put both on floppy/cd/usb or even HDD too
if you put plop on floppy maybe only choice since it wont boot cd's nd hd is unavailable

sadly there is no floppy drive, any other options?

EDIT: coming back to the original problem at hand, why do you think the boot stops during? and why do i keep on getting "can't access tty" error?

I think sometimes when trying to partition/ or mess with the drives
some distros apps (cfdisk,etc) dont work right from a pcmcia-cdrom/usb,etc
as maybe they get confused about the drive layout?

not really sure
I do know that sometimes when the disk is deleted, as with dd,etc
and then you dont format it(just leave it blank)
many distros will not boot, get kernel panics,etc

are you sure you formatted it?
it sounds like the partition table is messed up?

IF you can get any distro booted up
try dd'ing the disk, and then using cfdisk or preferably Gparted
to fix it

Do you have other linux cd's to try?
I would encourage you to try GRML medium or full 2009.10
as it has all the tools you need and has better hw detection than even KNOPPIX

at this stage the only thing that "boots" properly is the system rescue cd, which as i said comes up to the boot menu, where one can run some small app.s like ranish.. I have tried to format the partition with FAT32, don't think it made any difference.. I have tried dd and zero-ed out the HDD, at this stage i think there is one big partition with ext2, and a swap partition about 1G. Gonna check it again now..

It's particularly joy when the "super"drive in my macbook is tripping too, so I don't know if i can burn other distros and try now.. :S We'll see..


EDIT: So here's the partition table as it looks now:
0: MBR
1: Unused (only 64 cylinders/blocks)
2: >PRI (bootable) Ext2 38G
3: PRI swap 1G
4: Unused (64 cyl/blocks)

MMMmmmm...
well, all cd's get to the isolinux boot menu
yes?
If so, you can use plop off cd to boot a usb
do you wanna do that?

I would totally wipe the table again

now, you haven't messed with the partitions, then re-did them again before rebooting?
I assume you know you gotta reboot every time you change the partition table
before you change it again?

EDIT: whats PRI?

Well i have rebooted the machine at least 100 times, when things get stuck there's only one thing to do: CTRL-ALT-DEL
I guess I don't have much else I can do right now... I have briefly checked the Plop webpage and it seems like there are many ways to install that, which one am i going for? and with the usb, do i just throw in an iso image onto my usb stick or do i have to make it bootable somehow?

PRI I believe stands for primary

Well, do you have another computer to use?

If you go get my 503box-Live-rc2.iso
you can easily putt that on usb with Unetbootin

Best way is to burn 503box to cd-r
then boot 503box cd and install any distro to usb
via Unetbootin within 503box
I made 503box for making distros/installing to usb,etc
it also has plop and netbootcd(net-install any major distro)

check it out, both 503box and phalanx-9.04
http://multidistro.com/downloads/current/read.txt

forgot to mention in that page user info for 503box

username: guest
password: 55

username: root
password: 77

Ok, hold on a sec, I am not following this part... Got a little confused..
What's the plan:
- I download and burn 503box on a cd-r
- Boot from that and ?

or did i misunderstood completely?


What are these anyways? 503box and phalanx i mean? And why do i need uname and pwd?

Sorry bro
OK
You muust have syslinux-3.72 or higher to have a graphical boot menu
503box-Live is a Debian_live remaster I made so that you can use it as a Desktop installed to usb or hdd
and you can also use it as a rescue linux too

if you put 503box-Live on usb or cd it has all you need to fix your problem + more

Phalanx-9.04 is a Ubuntu-9.04 remaster I made with LXDE desktop and it has rescu stuff too
and Chromiun, Firefox, and Opera 10 + flash 10

Both are made to run off usb with/without persistence
I make multidistro stuff
you will need username/password to login if you get either one

Phalanx-9.04
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...DE-52442.shtml

And I made both so that Unetbootin will auto-install either to usb
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/