Have an XP system that is not compatable with my old scanner (Acer 6687 flatbed scanner). It will work on win 95 or 98 but want to know if it will work with a linux system.

My XP has 2 hard drives. I formatted the smaller 6GIG one as a FAT32 and wanted to use that but I can't seem to get the system to boot on my CD drive.

Tried to make a DOS boot CD but haven't quite figured that one out yet..lol At least I might be able to load win 95 to the second HD and run my scanner there.

Hope someone can help!

Bob

You can run linux straight from a CD: NO changes made to your hard disk unless you click on "Install", and even then there's a chance to abort (though why anyone would want to is beyond me). Programs are slow to load (as they load from the CD), but you can find out if things are likely to work or not.

There are several "Live CD" distros.
Knoppix is renowned for good hardware detection, kubuntu is popular (and I like it).

Get one from http://distrowatch.com/

Download the iso
Burn it to a CD as an ISO image (If you end up with just one big file called something.iso on the CD, then you did it wrong).
Set your BIOS to boot from CD
Insert the CD
Plug in and turn on your scanner
Plug in your ethernet cable
Boot to linux

The KDE scanning application is called kooka It works well. You may need the command sane-find-scanner in a terminal to see if your scanner can be found, otherwise kooka will probably find it.

If you choose to install linux, make a backup of any important files first. Then the installer will help you repartition your drive, and format it with a linux filesystem. An 8GB drive is small by today's standards, I'd probably prefer to use it all for linux: 512MB for swap and the rest for /

Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback Tradegar!!

Happy holidays and all that by the way.

I was able to figure out how to dl a dos auto boot CD and get it to run, so I see I am able to boot off the #1 CD drive.

I tried to DL an auto boot copy of Ubuntu, but was never able to get it to work....must have screwed something up!

Will try again....patience huh?...LOL

Regards,

Gololf

look at your burnt boot CD from a windows computer (or, even a linux one if you have one handy).
There should be lots of files /directories on it.

As I said before, if there's just one .iso file, then you burnt it as a file, and not as an ISO Image.

Check the options in your cd burning software - it'll be there somewhere, choose it and try again.

Hey tredegar,

Well I was able to create a freedos boot cd and get my comp to boot from the cd drive to that dos boot disc.

I booted dos and looked for my G: drive but it wouldn't find it....it did find C: and its' partition D:

G: is a separate drive after C:, a small drive for backing up I guess.

I then found a 3.5 disc for A: drive that was a win98 boot disc and tried that after booting the freedos because the winxp would't boot from the A: drive....just the F: cd drive first. SO that seemed to do something as it gave me a wierd yellow screen with some command menues up top left and some desktop icons down the right side....mut my mouse wouldn't work so couldn't get them to work...lol

I d/l'd the Kubantu (correctly), and copied the files to a cd but the computer won't boot it up! I also have a few freeby discs from magazines from Barnes & Noble (different versions) but none of them will boot up automaticvally!

Frustrating!


Gololf

I don't "do" DOS, or "windows", or "lol"
Sorry I cannot help you further.