Hi All!

I have a really disturbing problem, please someone help me.

I have a IBM NetVista machine which , as IBM sais , can only be powered by MicroSoft Windoze. Seems they right . When I tried to boot from a distro CD (I tried a couple of them) It said:
Invalid boot.ini file... booting from hard disk 0.

To me it seems that the BIOS searches only for a windoze boot file. Is it possible??

Can I somehow make a trick to the BIOS, so that it finds a BOOT.INI, but somehow it makes the machine boot to linux?

I tried booting off of a USB pendrive, I copied vmlinuz and image.gz and then run syslinux for the usb pen. But it can't boot from it although I said the BIOS to do so.

Can anyone give me some advice?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

No direct experience myself but this http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200604/netvista_s40.html seems to suggest you face a bit of a struggle if you have similar model. Author is trying to install BSD but I presume the initial hangs are applicable to any non-windoze os. Solution doesn't appear that simple either. Dont know how you might edit the windoze boot.ini file to allow booting an install cd.

Thanks beagle2!

After I made some simple modification in the BIOS now I can boot from an install CD (that was my fault I could not do this before). If IBM is right I won't be able to boot the installed system from the hard drive. I haven't tried it so far, but with USB boot device I do have this problem.

I have an IBM NetVista (not my choice) as well. I installed Fedora Core 4 last year and everything was going fine. The only problem was that it would not see my sound card. I upgraded to Core 5 this year and it seemed to be working fine, but then the system will lock up after it's been up for about an hour. I tried a fresh install of Core 5 about 2 weeks ago and no change.