screwy boot options and BIOS

meltdown_override · 02-16-2007, 09:56 PM

I have a gateway solo 9100. I went into bios and enabled boot from cd. It boots win98 and win95 just fine,but it can not boot any livecd or winxp,2000,orME.This is driving me crazy.I just burnt Slax,DSL-N and Nimblex live cd. All three livecd boots fine on another laptop and two desktop systems.Yet the solo 9100 wont recognize anything but win98/95.Why? Out of curiosity I made a boot cd from winxp that booted just fine only I can't read the c: drive on those desktop system(fat16/32 boot can't read ntfs I guess)I then tried that boot cd on the problem gateway,well to my astonishment it worked.(still could'nt read the only fat32 partition hda5)Any thoughts as to why my gateway laptop won't boot linux livecd and only boots win98?This is nuts!
Oh BTW on the gateway,when I try and boot from the cd,it just goes into the grub to boot dsl wich is installed on hda1.I just want to run those cd to see if my lappy can handle a 2.6 kernal.

J.W. · 02-16-2007, 11:36 PM

In your BIOS boot sequence, is the CD drive listed at the top?

meltdown_override · 02-16-2007, 11:46 PM

When I enter into BIOS I go to the boot sequence part and the selections are just weird.I have to se the - and + to navigate that section and here is the folowing menu option. C: (then I press +)A: (another +) c: then a: (again I press +)A: then C: (my last + selection)CD So I leave it at CD and save and exit BIOS. The weird thing is,that this lappy reads the MBR on a win98 cd with no problem.It just dont see a winxp or live cd.

J.W. · 02-18-2007, 12:18 AM

Not sure I follow, but if your boot sequence is something like

Code:

Hard Drive
Floppy 
CD-ROM

then that would explain why you cannot boot from your CD. To fix it, change your boot sequence to

Code:

CD-ROM
Floppy
Hard Drive

The idea is that the PC will attempt to boot from each device in order, and as soon as it finds one that it can boot, it will. In practice, you typically would not have anything in either the CD or floppy, so the PC would end up booting from the hard drive. If you did have something in the CD or floppy though, the PC would end up booting from it instead of the hard drive

meltdown_override · 03-07-2007, 11:54 PM

actually,thats not how my bios looks at all. The first selection is c: this is how my bios looks

the first option goes like this

boot: c:

after hitting the +or- it looks like this

boot: a:

another hit of the + brings you to this

boot: a: then c:

again another + and we have

boot: c: then a:

and the last selection is

boot: CD-ROM

there is not way to scroll up or down from a list. everything is on a defferent screen(same BIOS screen just the boot selection is a side by side and not a scrollable list)This is one screwy laptop. Ell, its screwier than Tom Cruise on Opra's couch.