Installation Conundrum
 

Hi

I have a bit of installation problem as follows

I have an invalid partition table (probably due to me mucking around with cfdisk parameters), a non-booting CDROM (despite being able to read and write), a BIOS that does not allow USB booting.

There exists a NTFS parition on the single hard drive which I would like to preserve and I would like to install Linux (the flavour is kind of irrelevant but was thinking Slackware) to the another existing ext4 partition.

Ideas please.

I might have to go hunting for a 3.5 inch floppy as I think the FDD might work.

Cheers

A good first step would be to move the hard drive into a working computer (or an external USB drive caddy) so you can rescue the data on the NTFS partition. While you're at it you can install Linux, too, and then swap the drive back. :)

What is a "non-booting" CD drive? If the drive will read CDs, then it should be OK for booting. do you have a CD that is known to boot on another machine? ---If not, then make a Linux Live CD (download just about any of the more common distros) What happens if you try to boot from CD?

A non-booting CD-ROM is just that. The CD-ROM worked under windows but with the BIOS set as bootable device, a bootable CDROM will not boot.

I have tried various live CDs without much success. The drive whirs and clicks and then I get an Operating System Not Found error message.

The machine is an old laptop (Sony PCG FR720) with 768MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive.

I think I will be looking for a working floppy disk yet.

If it's an old laptop which can boot from the CDROM drive, but the CDR/RWs you burn won't boot, it may be the media causing the problem. If you're using a CDRW don't, get a standard CDR, burn at a low speed and try that.