25 : Disk read error
This error is returned if there is a disk read error when trying to probe or read data from a particular disk.

Maybe you have a bad HD, bad install, or combo...

Still struggling to get Linux on the old laptop

My research indicates that old laptops frequently have trouble installing Linux from CD-ROM and a floppy install in conjunction with the CD-ROM is recommended.

However, most laptops have one bay that is shared by the floppy drive and CD drive. In other words, you can't use both at the same time. I have a USB floppy drive, but my laptop doesn't recognize it, so that's not an option.

This weekend, I'll head to the library and look for an old copy of Red Hat to try--and keep my fingers crossed.

That's very unlikely to be your problem. As I understand it, you've been all the way through the installation, and the system will not boot from the hard disk. Correct me if I'm wrong.

If this is the case, then a hybrid floppy/cdrom install isn't going to help. An alternate install method is only going to work if you do not trust the media that you are using (or the drive).

You may have a hardware problem, or your /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 file (or /boot/grub/stage2) is not near enough to the beginning of the drive. You did say this is older hardware. It's possible that your disk is scratched, or that your drive does not properly read it (some drives are finicky). Perhapse your hard drive has bad sectors?

dear spencex,
I will ruminate on that name.The boot floppy will only work if the os is already installed and appseams to be reliant on floppies made on that installation. External floppies, etc, have to be mounted to include them in an internal system and I think this appies for Windows as well.The mounting maybe reliant on creating a file but am doing some head-sratching and do think the difference is to do with internal/external. Why do you keep a laptop-updating must be a pain.


Roy.

There is another lightweight Linux OS you can try and that's SAM Linux, download, screenshots, etc from here:http://sam.hipsurfer.com/news.php Once again this is a 'live' CD which you can install if it plays nice on your rig. I had this running for three months earlier on this year installed on an old 600 MHz AMD machine sporting 128 MB ram, and it was perfectly usable as basic computer for surfing, email, and simple office tasks.

SAM Linux uses the Xfce 4.4 desktop, which is nice and light, less demanding on the computer and brilliantly useable. I realise your candidate computer is rather less powerful that the one I installed SAM Linux on but the SAM developers claim that their Linux OS can run on a mere 300MHz CPU or less, so maybe it's worth a try.

You do, of course, need to make sure that the computer hardware you intend to install to is in good order, but that applies to any installation of any OS on any computer.