Can't get any linux distributions to boot up on my old laptop...

I have a Dell Lattitude C510/C610, 1 Ghz Pentium 3 with 256 megs of RAM. I put windows 98 se on it, runs great. However, I've been trying to put fedora 8 on it. I change the boot settings in the bios and it just does not want to boot up from the cd. I've tried several different linux cds, debian, fedora 8, knoppix, bt3, none of them will boot up. I upgrade the BIOS to the most recent revision A16 and still nothing. I have a Matshita UJDA360 dvd, would a firmware upgrade help?

Also, if all else fails, how else could I install a linux distro on it?

Also, I was looking at the bios boot up menu and there's an option to boot form the ethernet card. Could I setup a NFS and install it from there? Do I just copy all the data from the linux distro cd to a directory and make sure that directory is available for my internal network to see?

Grab Debian Testing network install disk.

When you fire up the initial boot, you will see options for enabling safe boot options. This will turn off things like ACPI which is a notorious hang up on older hardware.

Most boot disks offer this option, but you may have to look for it in the boot menu or manually add it to the boot command line.

Debian is also an excellent starting point for the newbie.

Here is a documented method to install any flavour of ubuntu without a booting from CDrom.

http://ubuntu-tutorials.blogspot.com...tuxubuntu.html

You could also use a pen drive to install to, as an alternative.

camorri be carefull, if it will not boot from cd it may not boot from usb either.

There's no usb flash drive in the boot up option. U guys think an upgrade in the firmware of the dvd would help?

Originally Posted by trist007 I have a Dell Lattitude C510/C610, 1 Ghz Pentium 3 with 256 megs of RAM. I put windows 98 se on it, runs great. However, I've been trying to put fedora 8 on it. I change the boot settings in the bios and it just does not want to boot up from the cd. I've tried several different linux cds, debian, fedora 8, knoppix, bt3, none of them will boot up. I upgrade the BIOS to the most recent revision A16 and still nothing. I have a Matshita UJDA360 dvd, would a firmware upgrade help? Also, if all else fails, how else could I install a linux distro on it? Also, I was looking at the bios boot up menu and there's an option to boot form the ethernet card. Could I setup a NFS and install it from there? Do I just copy all the data from the linux distro cd to a directory and make sure that directory is available for my internal network to see?

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Just out of curiosity, does your bootable cd/dvd have one file on it or many files? You do know the difference between copying the ISO file onto the cd/dvd and burning the image from the ISO file onto the cd/dvd? Just a thought, have seen this be a show stopper before.

Jim

It's got many. I made sure and burned the image into the dvd. Also, I used fedora 8 dvd from linux central and still nothing. All the cds are workable on my other computer.

Would installing via nfs work? How would I do this?

Hi,

You seem to have the boot order setup with win98 being installed?
The cd/dvd is the first boot device, right?

The cd/dvd could have a compliance problem since you state the cd/dvds read on other machines. Is this device a R/W or ROM?

You could try some earlier versions of a distro too make sure it's not a BIOS block read error for the device, some older machine BIOS have trouble reading newer distro cd/dvd.

In order to do a NFS or for that matter any install you would need to have means to setup the network boot. If you have a local machine then PXE would be another way you could setup your network boot.

It's an R/W. Yeah I'm gonna try out Fedora 5 or 6 this weekend. I'll let u know. Or which version of Fedora would be good to try?

Please forgive for me asking a stupid question. I am quite familiar with the Dell C510/C610 laptop series you describe.

Does the laptop have a CD/DVD drive or just a CD drive? Some models, depending on configured options, only had a CD drive which won’t read DVDs.

If you trying to boot with a Fedora 8 disk, make sure it is CD and not a full DVD.

About a month ago I installed Arch on a C600, and only really had problems with a flaky optical drive. How is it failing to boot up?