Issues booting from Live CD on IBM T40
 

(SOLVED)

Hello all,

First time poster, long time fan. I picked up an old IBM T40 running WinXP, but I want to replace it with the latest distro of LMDE, Mepis or even Slackware. I made a Live CD for each ISO using Roxio, but when I went to change the boot order in my BIOS to CD/ROM it ignores it every time and defaults to WinXP again and again. I even tried using my USB stick and I still get the same results. Very frustrating! and although I am still a noob I have been using various distros on my netbbook for the past few years and have become very fond of using linux for many reasons. Can someone give me some advice on how to get WinXP off my T40??!! Thanks in advance.

If its booting from the HDD time and again, are you sure the media disks that you created are bootable?

Test the disk in some other computer maybe.
Borrow some xp cd and see if that boots maybe on ibm.

Since you say you have used linux before I kind of suspect you burned it correctly as an image an not a file. But, just for grins, we'd know that with the test on line 1


I rather doubt it but it could be that you need to create a new disk. Some other drives had a hard time booting off cd-r and even harder on cd-rw. I have found that using black cd-r and burning at slowest speed possible tends to produce a disk that usually boots on suspect older systems. Any your system is not what I'd call suspect.

To enable the selection of the boot device during startup of the machine enter your ThinkPad T40 BIOS, go to Startup menu and switch Boot device List F12 Option to Enabled. Then exit BIOS saving the changes. In result it will be possible to press F12 key just after startup of the machine and to select the required boot device.

Hey all,

thanks for all the replies. FYI, I am using DVD-R disks for my Live CD medium.

@ linuxlover.chaitanya:

"If its booting from the HDD time and again, are you sure the media disks that you created are bootable?"

I'm pretty confident the disks are bootable, but I can't test it at the moment bcuz my other computer is a netbook with no CD/DVD drive. However, I have successfully created ISO images on USB's and CD's before and kinda know the routine with Unetbootin and Nero. The USB keys I created with LMDE, Slax, AntiX, are all working off my netbook perfectly fine, but is not recognized by my T40 no matter what order I change the boot settings to.

The process: I enter BIOS thru F12 at startup and make the changes to the boot from APCI CD0, USB/CD, USB FDD, APCI CD1, etc... then I save changes and hit restart. The CD/DVD or USB drive hums away, but then WinXP keeps popping up like a bad dream.

I have movie CD's and DVD's that play very nice with my T40, but why not DVD-R with the ISO images??!!

I just KNOW this is something very simple that I am missing... I just know it.

@ w1k0:

I believe I did enable the boot selection F12, but it doesn't hurt to try again. Thanks again.

Aha! It would help if I used "rewritable" disks! Currently trying Mepis 11, Absolute 13.37 and LMDE. Cheers all!!!

Congratulations. But the post icon is still Android.

The post icon is Android bcuz I responded from my mobile phone. Take care.