I've got an old laptop (Dell Inspiron 3500, 256 meg memory, 266 meg motherboard) I'm trying to repurpose. I've tried rebooting with a knoppix 7.2 live disk but the laptop skips the disk and boots from the windows hard drive. I'm sure the disk is okay because I was able to boot another notebook with it. The only thing I can think of is the disk was made on a 64 bit system while the target system is a 32 bit. Am I right? The cd drive works, it can boot from a windows xp install disk.

If the Knoppix iso is 64bit and your computer hardware is only 32bit, it won't work. The reverse does. I don't think creating it on a 64bit machine would matter if the iso itself was 32bit. You indicate you have booted an xp install disk successfully, do you still have the CD drive set to first boot priority? Are you planning to use Knoppix to recover data or a similar purpose? According to their web site, it is not suitable to be installed on a hard drive for users who are not 'Linux Experts', their words. You will have a very difficult time updating anything on it due to the nature of the system.

Thanks for the reply. I know there is a knoppix cheatcode to use it on a 64 bit computer, I thought the default was 32 bit. The cd is the first drive in the boot sequence, I have checked the bios several times. The laptop boots from the hard drive even when a disk is in the cd drive. As to purpose, I am trying to boot to knoppix just to make sure I can boot from the cd. Eventually I will install a suitable form of linux.

found a pretty cool boot CD a while back called plop boot CD which actually enables an older pc originally incapable of booting from usb to do just that! I have found usb installs to go much faster than CD.

www.plop.at/en/ploplinux/iso.html

http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/
http://distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall/current/
http://www.slitaz.org/en/
http://kolibrios.org/en/
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
http://www.minix3.org/

New tricks are everywhere.

Happy Trails, Rok