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My friend was generous enough to unload a piece of crap laptop on me. Its reformatterd, and a bay for a removable floppy and cdrom drive. I can't boot from cd or access the BIOS, and theres no nic for a network install of an OS. Are there any operating systems I can install from a floppy? I've found plenty of bootable linux distributions, but I can't seem to find one which will make an install on my system. Is there any way I can just compile the latest linux kernel and put it on a bootable floppy for install?
Almost every major distro has boot floppy images included on their cds, in Slackware you can find them in the /bootdisks directory and you can find floppy images of the installer files in the /rootdisks directory, what you do is copy a kernel image from the bootdisks directory and install.1 + install.2 from the rootdisks directory to three blank floppy's, then you boot with the floppy's and install from the cd. There are more in depth instructions in the respective directories on the cd.
Well, I've tried a couple of the bootdisks from slackware such as bare.i and a few others, and they all give the message Boot Failed, insert another disk and press any key to continue. Also, there is only one bay on the laptop, so I can only use one drive at a time. If the slackware boot disks support booting from floppy and then changing out the drive, it'd be perfect, but the disks haven't worked in the past. I'll keep trying. Thanks for the advice.
It's a Toshiba Tecra 720CDT. I figured out how to access the BIOS. I didn't see anything that could help me.
I tried the slackware boot discs, and the only one to work so far has been scsi.s. I booted and loaded the root discs into the memory. I took out the floppy drive and put in the cdrom drive with the slackware disc. But when I attempted to select the media source, it couldn't detect the cdrom...I'm assuming because it's in the same bay the boot floppy was. I'm out of ideas short of buying an external parallel port cdrom drive, which slackware supports. I'd rather not spend any money, but I don't know what else to do.
Help!
-j03
You must be very careful with toshiba bios, very easy to corrupt, and without toshiba support, they are very difficult to replace, but they can be done. your toshiba can not boot from the cdrom, but it can boot from floppy. some of the bay type used drive overlays to communicate with the bios, if the system was reformatted then the software for this is gone, also on a few there were tools available with the windows distro called tsetup,
some toshiba drives are cloaked scuzzi drives
most have key escape sequences to access the bios on boot. esc, alt f1 or f8, and a few others, sometime these default keys are changed by the owner for security reasons, and permanently writen to the bios, physical bios chip replacement is the only repair.
there are some small linux distros available on floppy that can boot from floppy, with at least enough code to put enough info on the hard drive to access the cdrom, and install a better distro.
all of the above involves custom building but it can be done, sparc and backpac drives were available for windows, and I think that some of the coding was also ported to linux. thes had to be set up in dos, then used with win 95.
it is also possible to install/borrowl a pcmcia card and install from a network, or direct from another pc.
I am sure the pcmcia support is built into the bios by default on toshibas.
I have a Compaq LTE 5280. I want to put any kind of os on it because I have the same problem of not being able to boot from the CD. All I want to do is be able to run simple C programs from the box so I can take and send messages from the parrellel port. I'd like to use linux for it's stability. This thing is basicly going to be turned on and should never be turned need to be rebooted except for reprograming/maintenance. I hope to make it the brain for a small mobile robot and code in mapping programs and interaction elements but thats for many years down the road right now all I want is a stable os. Anyone know of a good distibution of linux that might meet needs or will they all be sutable for my needs? I also need to know more about how to actually get the OS onto the laptop.
Another option as well for laptops with bad/? CD-ROM drives.
Try Slackware's zipslack, http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/.
You use a FAT partition on your laptop, a floppy disk with your laptop's fd drive, your laptop's parallel port, and a zip disk in an external zipdrive (other HW reqs here, http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/sysreq.php)
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