How can i Install Linux without a cdrom and no floppy
 

Hey i bought a Dell Latitude Cp. I bought a 40Gb IDE HDD and a 64Mb ram for it for all under a tenner.For some reason when i turn it on it says there is no hard drive. I have formated it to FAT32 and still nothing. But thats not the point. I need to install a small linux on it like DSL or basic linux or even redhat. I have no floppy or cd rom drives. I have one usb and thats it. It has Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS version 1,10 A02 and MagicGraph 128XD 48K SVGA BIOS. Please help me failing is not an opition please tell me how to install :).

Can you boot from USB?
Please provide more info?

Set the partition you made 'active' or label it 'boot' with fdisk or cfdisk.

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On the other questions: what input devices -do- you have? will it do a network-boot? a usb-stick or usb harddrive to boot from? you must have some device to get it to boot from.

maybe it's possible to partition the harddisk, make it bootable and have it in someway boot-ready before you connect it into the pc.

My laptop is pretty baisc. I really only want it as a we book.Iv made a DSL live usb i plug it in and cant figure out how to boot it. the boot sequence is diskette first but i can change it to hard disk only. I have no option to boot from a usb or live cd :(. will i make a video of it ?

OK, you can't boot from cd or usb and no floppy either?
What system is on it now?
How did you format it FAT32 if it can't boot anything?

IT currntly has a brand spanking new 40Gb IDE hard drive. I formatted it with swiss knife to backup my ps3 , then i reformmated it for the laptop. I activated a partition. I have no floppy disk drives or cd rom drives. I have a single usb port which i dont think i can boot form. It doesnt seem to beable to find my HDD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XRInKzWJg thats what happens. Need any specific pictures ?

OK what is "I formatted it with swiss knife to backup my ps3 , then i reformmated it for the laptop. I activated a partition."
How did you do that?
Removed laptop hd and put it in another pc to format it?

Ye i have an external IDE cabby i formatted it with.

It doesn't look good, I've never seen a 40GB FAT32 formatted HD, why FAT32?
Senior members here can help with the HD problem(laptop recognizing it) as that's not my forte...
However; if you can get it to recognize the hd then maybe were in business.
Anybody can help?

Well my PC recognizes it alright. I came as a NTFS hdd , but i tohught due to my laptop is an older machine i better format it to an old standered.

Format it to ext3 please.

If I understand correctly, your machine wont recognise it. How do you mean, the BIOS wont recognise it? A live environment wont recognise it?

As for the second option, you seem to be having trouble booting from USB. Perhaps your BIOS doesn't support this. You could, of course, try updating this.

Ok i think i probably should try and update them , but how ?

Well its a bit of a catch 22 at this stage, you can't get the USB stick to boot without the BIOS update, but you can't get the BIOS update without the USB stick booting.

But to go back to my original question, how do you know the machine wont recognise the HDD? Is it in the BIOS it isn't being picked up? I'm still shakey on that bit.

OK well i put my HDD in the caddy and iv screwed it in yet it still doesn't find it.

You're missing my point- how do you know? its not seen it? What exactly is it saying and where

It's pretty simple. In order to install anything, you must be able to boot something. Your computer obviously will not handle a usb boot.

This means getting an external cd drive or external floppy. I recommend the cd drive. even borrow one!

Get the HDD out again, format the drive to have a primary partition in either NTFS or EXT3 format. Label this partition bootable.
Put it back in, if the pc still won't recognize it, thats it then. find yourself another (smaller/supported) hdd and start all over.

I assume, when the pc recognizes a disk, it should be possible to 'fill' it with a minimum windows or linux installation, then slot the disk into the laptop, and it could boot,. have network, and from there get a linux running that's build to your needs.

Do you have option to use PXE?

Also if you can connect to the web try zipslack:
ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slac...11.0/zipslack/

I dunno if it is/will be updated anymore tho!
I have heard of people using it to build up a proper Linux environment!
But it is Slackware which is not newby friendly!

P.S.: Try this:

Get the HDD out, put it in your cradle and:
- partition the drive to have a primairy disk of about 1 gb
- set is as 'active'/'boot'
- format it as FAT32 with 'copy systemfiles'

in the old days, with MS DOS 5.0 floppydisks you could transfer 'system' with the command "sys a: c:" (where a: = floppy, c: = harddrive)
Nowadays ( with Win98, W2k and XP (even with vista?) ) you can 'check the box' at 'copy systemfiles'

If the hdd is set active, but there's nothing on the disk ( no system, no nothing, just formatted) the pc will still generate an error at boottime, stating something that could be interpreted as 'there's no disk to boot from' might be something like:

- Drive not ready - System Halted
or:
- Disk boot failure - Insert system disk and press Enter
or:
- Boot Failure: System Halted

All of these messages could mean the pc recognized the disk, but couldn't 'do' anything with it.

Hey guys did you watch his video? He actually have two problems, not one.

Franz422: your first problem is with hardware. Your laptops BIOS does not detect your HDD (Primary hard disk drive 0 not found during POST, Modular bay: Not Installed in SETUP). So you need to solve this first before trying to install anything. This has nothing to do with whatever partitions or filesystems you have on that disk.

Check whether you have all cables properly connected. Whether you have your HDD correctly jumpered (Master/Single). If all this seems fine, check whether your motherboard in laptop supports that kind of HDD (though 40GB seems reasonably small to me).

Problem getting Linux installed into this machine we can solve later.

I checked little bit your laptop specification. Dell latitude cp m166st (hope I read it correctly) was suppose to have 1.6GB HDD expandable to 2.7GB So I am not quite sure it can handle 40GB HDD. If you have possibility try smaller one.

Do you have the jumpers settings changed? Maybe try another hard disk as well, maybe the hard disk itself has a hardware problem.

Linux Archive

"64Mb ram"

You need more ram. You might get a minimal disto like ZipSlack to work.

Basically you need a bootable device. If you don't have pxe on network then you will need either a cd/floppy or see if anyone remembers how to get pcmcia to boot.

If no boot then above stated you can remove the drive and install an OS on a remote system and return and repair.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IBM-DTNA-22160...3%3A1|294%3A50

SO if i buy this hard drive my laptop will recognize this hard drive allowing me to boot a basic Linux from it ?

Most probably yes. But before going to any harsh action and spending your money check whether there in no problem anywhere else. Most notably the jumper setting. You wrote that your HDD worked in your pc so I assume it is not damaged. How were you testing it? Again I am asking about jumper settings. Check also whether you have HDD detection set to auto in SETUP.