hi, i am a newbie. i have a very old sony vaio pcg-tr2a that i would like to revive with pupply linux. it's hard drive crashed and somebody wanted to throw it way. it has 512MB RAM. it doesnt have a floppy disk drive, it's CD ROM i cannot check if working. how can i boot? i tried using the CD Drive, it didnt work. what other options do i have? am i doing something wrong?

i tried booting it in a newer computer via flash drive and it worked.

any help will be appreciated.

thanks in advance

you have 2\3 options if you Vaio has a Floppy drive and a USB port. Make a live Usb of Puppy Linux on another computer using either the dd command (google it) or Unetbootin. Use the puppy live usb to make a wake pup floppy (it is in the menu). Use the wakepup floppy to boot the Vaio from USB.

Another Option is PLOPBootManager

And another option is Smartbootmanager

PLOP and Smartbootmanager can be installed onto a floppy and can be used to boot USB as well as a Wakepup floppy.

Edit: Thanks for the quote Tbone. I missed the not having a floppy drive part.

Well, if it doesn't boot from CD, has no floppy, and won't boot via USB, you've got no other options.

Replace/repair the CD drive on the laptop. You can also check the BIOS on the system, to make sure it is ABLE to boot via USB. If it's not, see if it'll boot from the network. If you can boot from network, your only option is to set up another machine to be a network boot server, and load from there.

If you can't boot from USB or network, you're dead. No options left.

It is so old it can't boot to cd or usb. Your only hope is if it boots pxe. PCMCIA is an option but is difficult.

If it does, see bios settings might have to enable it.
The most easy way is to get knoppix 5.x boot a some computer to knoppix and start knoppix terminal server. Follow instructions. Then connect crossover or (patches to hub/switch/router) to this laptop. The boot pxe. It ought to end up with knoppix running on both. Then the fun part starts.

thanks you guys

Here is an idea which can be used when you have an old machine and just might work.
Remove the hard drive and install it (you will need an adapter from the IDE to the smaller laptop IDE), as a slave hard drive in another machine. To do this, you can leave the side of a desktop open with a long enough cable and set the slave as a slave according the settings required for that drive, and make sure your c drive is set as a master or master/slave present.
What can be done next is to run the install from the cdrom disk drive and install to the slave. This is very important, make sure you are about to install it to the slave and not C. Because if you do install to c, it may not boot, that is because it may change the MBR.
Another more accurate way is to unplug the c drive completely on the desktop, and install the ISO from the cdrom disk drive directly to the laptop drive. Make sure you set the laptop drive as master, with no other drive in the system. It will also help to go to the bios settings and make sure the laptop drive can be seen as the drive it is.
After install, put your desktop back like it was, and re-install the laptop drive into your laptop. When you boot, you may have to tweak things to make it work like you want.
We actually used this way on an old Compaq 486 and installed Win95 it worked with some setup adjustments required. Since it has been some time, I am recalling what we did.
I am logging in on a Opensuse system, a great distro, by the way.

ok so here's the thing. I found an old laptop in the trash. It's hard drive crashed. i tried downloading puppy linux, burned it on a CD and tried to boot it to the old computer. it did not work. i tried to boot the CD to a my newer laptop. it still didnt work. is there something wrong with the way i burned the cd? i used unetbootin.

thanks,

Look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto