Craziest Laptop installation possible.....i think......if only it would work
 

G'day,
I have an old Toshiba TE2000 with a busted cd drive and an itch to install Linux on it. after failures in getting a PXE server up and running i tried something radicle as a post here said :crazy enough but i went forwards and installed SUse 10.0 on my laptops HD using a friends laptop. It boots perfectly on his laptop but when i move it to my laptop and try to boot it i get some messed up errors after GRUB. It ofcourse detects all the new hardware and goes stir crazy but then i get this : i am kicked into a very basic console with most commands in-operational. i have no clue why it doesnt detect my Suse partitions, i had XP originally on hda1 and that still boots up fine.

Any suggestions would be helpfull.
thanx

Which hard drive devices are listed in /dev ? Is /dev/hda3 the correct partition? Maybe it appears as /dev/hdb3.

Thats the problem, i cant check anything. The console wont even allow me to do ls. and yes, hda3 is the linux partition and hda5 is the swap partition.

I might have the sollution. This sort of installation was done successfully by someoone using an old laptop and Fedora 4. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...then+take+care
could it be because of some lacking on Suse's part that this is not working out ??

Grub has a primitve ls-like feature. Open a command prompt in it before linux starts, then do:
cat (hd<tab>

It has command completion like in bash, which ends up listing the files. For example, my root partition is on hda2. In grub I can read the grub.conf with this:
cat (hd0,1)/boot/grub/grub.conf

This won't test much with Linux itself. It'll only test that the hard drive is working and the disk geometry is correct. I don't know enough about Suse to tell you what it's missing.

A while ago I modified a Live-CD distro to boot from a USB disk. I ran into a similar problem where I was dropped to a command prompt, but couldn't do anything. I redid my initrd with busybox. That way most of the standard commands will fit.

Before I start a lengthy explanation, is that something you want to try?

No thanks mate, i found the root of the problem, its was Suse itself!! You seethe thread where i got the idea from said a programme called Kudzu would automatically repair the kernal and remove the installation laptops config and detect/configure the new hardware in the 2nd laptop. however, i worked with the assumption that perhaps Suse does not have this feature ( those ppl had installed FC4 as it is ) so i did a re-installation using my friends laptop of FC3 ( my FC4 dvd refused to work for the 1st time :( ) and after i transfered the hard-disk back onto my laptop FC3's kudzu automatically removed the old hardware and installed the new one. As i speak i am writting this on my laptop from FC3 itself :) now i just have to figure out how to upgrade to FC4 using yum and i'll be the happiest person on the planet.

Thanx for ur time.