i got an ibm thinkpad 560 at a great price.. but sadly it has no cdrom. just a floppy. so i took out the Hard Drive and put it in my desktop, which is running windoes xp. i installed a linux distro based on morphix called phlak, and then put the laptops hard drive back in the laptop. it works... in what i feel is a limited capacity. for example, i have to manually config eth0 everytime i boot, and i get a myriad of errors in verbose boot. one i remember is "bios error code 0x99" there are more but they go by so fast that it would be next to impossible to get the specifics.
My questions is , is there a command or syntax that will probe the laptop and get the new specc, and then write that to the hard drive so it will function properly?
desktops specs:
2.2 ghz proc
512 ram
20 gig hd

laptop specs:
166 mhz
72 ram
2.1 Gigs HD


please dont say i need to remove the OS. dont wanna run windows on it.


Doesnt anyone know?

While you're waiting for someone to come by, you might consider hedging your bets and asking on the Morphix forums (and don't forget to tell them to update their "related projects" page, as PHLAK does not appear there), or in fact on the PHLAK forums themselves?

I've never used this particular one but distrowatch says its a livecd so my thinking is that it depends on how you installed it and how comprehensive the autodetection is.

If you did it while running windows then you probably have a fat32 parition on the drive and that won't work right for booting linux.

If you booted your desktop with the live cd and then copied the root directory over rather than the cd you may have ended up with a bunch of virtual files configured for your destop. That would require configuring everything the hard way.


I think that if you tried boot from the cd on the desktop and then make sure you copy the system from the drive rather than from the root directory it should work. But make sure you write a linux partition to the disk first.

If that's what you did and it didn't work then it doesn't have the hardware compatability you need and you'll have to do it all manually.

You have lots of options besides going back to windows. There are live cd's based on just about eveyr distro. My thought is that the slackware based Slax would be the best for an older laptop. But you may wanna try Debian based Mepis or Knoppix wich seem to have the most comprehensive hardware detection.

Dont Forget about DSL (Damn Small Linux) I believe it is Debian Based.

my goal of course is to "probe" the system using this distro, and to make the comp happy with it...

you may just have to recompile the kernel, assuming of course, that you have the source files on your computer, as to manually doing your eth0 settings, the lines you use to set it up can be added to the bottom of your rc.local file, and then the os will load them for you when you reboot