Can somone help me? I purchased a WD SATA Scorpio Blue drive and a 2-Port eSATA PCMCIA Cardbus to connect to my laptop. How do I install Dreamlinux on this external drive? I have tried 3 times, all seems to go well but DL will not boot!

What operating system(s) do you have on the laptop internal drive? Do you remember what option your selected at the end of the installation in regard to a bootloader? Do you havee anything else (other operating systems) on the external drive? Did you get any error messages during the installation?

What bootloader are you using to try to boot DreamLinux? Generally, problems like this relate to an error in the installation of the bootloader. If you are able to load the installation CD, open a terminal window and try to run the command: fdisk -l (lower case letter L) and post the output. This will provide your partition information and someone should be able to help you get it to boot.

It would also be useful to know if you intend to use/connect the external frequently or just occasionally.

Thank you so much,
I have Windows XP occupying my entire internal drive. I have an external SATA drive that connects through PCMCIA cardbus, I was able to successfully install DreamLinux on the Partitions I created on my external. I am trying to use one of those partitions as a bootloader so that I can have the option of loading either XP or linux. After installation and reboot, my pc went straight to windows and did not give me the option to load linux. How can I make my PCMCIA card bootable?

Does your BIOS allow you to boot from an external drive? Do you have the external drive set first boot priority to boot DreamLinux? I'm not familiar with PCMCIA Cardbus and don't know what impact, if any that would have on booting.

If you have XP on your internal drive and have the internal set to first boot priority, you need an entry for DreamLinux in the xp boot.ini file. Do you have that? If not, this link explains how to do that:

http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/113945

You could also install Grub stage1 to the mbr of the internal disk but, if you don't expect to have the external in use all the time, that would not be a good option.

The reason your computer boots straight to xp is because you have no entry for DreamLinux in boot.ini. Boot.ini is a hidden system file in the root (C:\) directory/folder.

If you aren't able to solve this, load your DreamLinux CD and as root, open a terminal and post the output of command: fdisk -l.