I have an oldish laptop that I'm trying to install any kind of *nix on it. Currently it has Windows XP on it, but it can't actually boot into XP without getting a BSOD.
So, I tried installing Xubuntu, Slackware and FreeBSD, but every time I get an odd clicking noise from the CD drive. I thought the CD drive must be busted so I started working on setting up a PXE server to boot from. Before I got too far into that, however, I thought I'd just try booting from a Windows boot disk. I stuck in a copy of TinyVista that I had lying around and it worked! How peculiar, I though to myself!
It would seem I have a computer that will only boot when a Windows disk is present!

I know it's not a problem with the boot disks, because I've successfully used them for other installations.

Depends on how old.

I've heard that sound before on drives which were unable to play/use a disk because of its format. So, presuming that you obviously aren't trying to boot DVDs in a CD-ROM drive, the next question would be, "How have you setup your disk burning for the boot CDs?" For old hardware, make sure you use these settings:

Writing Mode: TAO
File Systems: Rock Ridge and Joliet extensions (Unix and Windows)

Good Luck

Oh yeah, Welcome to LinuxQuestions!

We have an OLD laptop too -- a Toshiba Satellite xDVD-4090 - and it does that too with certain discs. It will boot a windows disk, but only SOME Linux discs, and it makes the same clicking sounds that yours does.

One thing with old laptops (and maybe desktops too) is that the BIOS is not clever enough to read the whole bootload section of the disc, if the bootload is larger than 4KB. In some cases (some machine), it will plow along anyhow, reading until it gets the EOF signal, and then boot; but in other cases (other machines like mine and yours) it will keep NOT reading the whole bootload on the disc, and eventually fail booting.

One thing you *might* be able to do, if you are creating the ISO image from files (using for example `mkisofs`) which you plan on burning for use on that machine, is to make sure you set the bootload size to 4KB and not the "standard" of 32KB. This *should* make the disc bootable on that machine.

Best of luck,
Sasha

The laptop in question is a Dell Latitude C610 circa about 2002 from what I can gather (I got it second-or-third-hand in 2006).

So I have another idea, then. If I were to somehow format the drive and put the installation disc image into a partition, would I then be able to boot into the installer, or would the 4KB rule still apply, even to a harddrive?


It strikes me as funny how I've gotten a stripped-down version of Windows 7 to install perfectly on an 8-year-old laptop, but I can't even get it boot from a Linux distrc!

The 4kb problem applies only to ISO images for use with optical drives. It would not apply on a hard disk, which uses the MBR as the initial boot code. However, I myself am not really sure how you would go about extracting the ISO to the hard disk and starting the installer; it can be done, but I have not done it myself, so I don't want to try to advise you about how to go about it.

About that funny thing with Windows-- a lot of Microsoft software does not necessarily follow the "standards", and to make matters worse, MS has in some cases 'defined' the standard. With so many hardware makers historically bending to the wishes of MS to keep the hardware MS-compatible, it's not a big wonder why so many things just seem to "work" where MS is concerned, but act up when non-MS comes into play.

Sasha

I have modified hybrid images of various Ubuntu ISO images, which can boot from a hard drive (including flash drives if your BIOS will treat them as a hard drive). You would put this image on a (temporary) 2nd hard drive and boot from that, to install the system to the first hard drive. To get the image to a hard drive, you would need to use the "dd" command or similar on another system where the drive can be attached. Copy the image to the WHOLE drive device (which obviously wipes out everything on the drive ... so be very careful), not a partition. The image can also be burned as an ISO (hence the hybrid designation).

http://slashusr.net/ubuntu/ubuntu-9....p-i386.iso.img

Unfortunately, the xubuntu images did not work with this modification.

Have you tried cleaning the lens with a cotton swab and some alcohol? Laptop drives have the lens pointing upward and dust or dirt tends to accumulate and cause problems reading discs. I've had some drives that would not read certain discs until I cleaned the lens.

Thank-you for this. Should be quite helpful!