Linux Install on HP zt1185
 

Hello all:

I'm new to this forum, and to a lesser extent Linux and I was recently given the following laptop, basic specs below. The problem I'm having is that I can't get any Linux distribution to run from DVD or install to the system. I've tried Debian, Fedora, Mint, Legacy Mini and DSL distributions with no luck. In fact, I can't even get DBAN to boot so I can wipe the drive and get rid of XP. So, I'm thinking there must be a problem with the DVD-ROM drive failing to recognize the burned ISOs?

I wanted to put Linux on this system and play around with it because it's old and was free, so I won't feel terrible if I can't make this happen, but it's frustrating. Any suggestions?

zt1185
P4 1.5GHz
512MB DDR @266MHz
AGP 4x - S3 Savage4
XP Home 32-bit

I haven't delved into the system enough to get specs on the board or anything.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Sorry for the obvious questions but...
a. Did you set your Boot Priorities in your bios to first boot from a DVD/CD if a bootable one was present.
b. Did you burn the iso image correctly using the "burn image" option (or something like it) of your disk burning software.
c. On some very old systems with very old CD readers it was necessary to use a usb DVD/CD reader in order to boot from it. Is this a possible problem?
jdk

Hello jdk,

Thanks for your prompt response.

a. Did you set your Boot Priorities in your bios to first boot from a DVD/CD if a bootable one was present. Yes
b. Did you burn the iso image correctly using the "burn image" option (or something like it) of your disk burning software. Yes
c. On some very old systems with very old CD readers it was necessary to use a usb DVD/CD reader in order to boot from it. Is this a possible problem? Not sure I understand this question. Do you mean is the optical drive a separate unit that has to be plugged in via USB? If that's the question, the answer is no, the optical drive is internal.
jdk

More info Linux install HP zt1185
 

The results on trying the various distros (and DBAN)

Mint 16 32-bit tried to run from DVD but crashed, most likely because I didn't have virtual machine installed and running.
Debian, Fedora Lgacy Mini and DSL not recognized as bootable discs. DBAN not recognized as bootable disc.

I tried burning the ISOs using the native software on Windows 7 and EasyISO.

If you have a flash drive (if not they are cheep) then try: http://www.isotousb.com/, it could be your optical drive?

Hello jamison,

Thank you for your reply. Actually, I tried following directions on PCSupport.com by using a flash drive and Universal USB Installer, but BIOS won't even recognize the option to boot from USB drive. I can choose hard drive, CD, or floppy (the system doesn't even have a floppy drive!)

Tomorrow I'm going to go online and see if I can find an updated driver for the optical drive, maybe that will help.

Well, thanks for looking folks and if anyone has a flash of inspiration please let me know.

Haave you tried from cd?

Hello EDDY1,

The results on trying the various distros (and DBAN)

Mint 16 32-bit tried to run from DVD but crashed, most likely because I didn't have virtual machine installed and running.
Debian, Fedora, Legacy Mini, and DSL not recognized as bootable discs. DBAN not recognized as bootable disc.

I tried burning the ISOs using the native software on Windows 7 and EasyISO.

Have you tried the disks on another computer?

There are also .exe (and like) installers for within microcoughed-winblow$ e.g: like:
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/WindowsInstaller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_%2...u_installer%29
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/20079...er-or-netbook/
... :)

Hello EDDY1,

Not yet. I have a Windows 7 laptop that I don't want to mess up, so I will either check out virtual machine and then see if I can get the discs to boot on that...

Or I have an AM3+ desktop that died from board failure, so I might wait for a new board to show up for that, I was planning to turn it into a Linux box anyway, it was XP before and I wanted to see how Linux would do for use as an inexpensive living room multimedia computer. Just something to play/stream movies and music, browsing, that kind of thing.

You only want to check to see if the disks are bootable not actually install to the other machine.
Also most distros in your list require atleast 1G of ram, while you only have 512Mb.

Hello jamison,

Thanks for this info.

This will result in a dual-boot situation, right? Although that would be OK, I'd like to get rid of XP entirely and force myself to practice on Linux daily until I have a better grasp on the OS and all the apps out there.

Hello EDDY1,

Yeah I realized the hardware might not support newer, more elaborate Linux versions, but DSL claims it will work with as little as 128MB RAM, or less.

Let me check and see if I can get these to boot on the 7 laptop...

Can't say for sure but If there's no option for the installer to wipe microsucks (perhaps taking you for a reboot) then you can use Linux to wipe the other partition and resize (e.g: how-can-i-resize-an-ext-root-partition-at-runtime) your Linuces partition then do ato remove the proprietary choice from the boot screen. ;)

P.s: Puppy is light...

The installs that you see in post #10 are just a file in windows.
If you can't get a cd to boot you can put hdd in external enclosure & install operating system, then put drive back.

Hello jamison,

Thanks for the info, doesn't sound too bad. I'll try using a .exe solution soon.

Hello EDDY1,

My 2.5" enclosure is not available at this time, probably not until the weekend, but I thought of just doing that earlier, I was just hoping there was a simpler way to accomplish this.

And on the installs, Mint 16 32-bit has loaded successfully to desktop on the other laptop, so I'll try the other discs but at least that one is OK on newer hardware.

Oh, and one more thing
 

The hard drive space numbers on the zt1185 aren't adding up, so I'm thinking there is an HPA of about 5GB hidden on the drive. DBAN says it won't access or erase an HPA, so is there a free program that will do so?

The mint cd will erase everything for you.

Really, I thought HPAs by definition were invisible to operating systems/installers?

Only to the windows system.

Also in windows you can use the command prompt to unhide hidden patition.

If you're really serious about installing linux then you can do a frugal install of whatever distro you want using unetbootin.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/une...i/installmodes

Wow, I am the nooblet.

Thanks all.

It's not as difficult as it seems.

Ahhh, I'm not worried about eventually getting it to work, just frustrated because of the extra element of difficulty due to the age of the hardware.

I appreciate the help all, and I'll let you know when I get the laptop up and running.

Nice!!!
 

Hello all,

I want to thank you again for all the info and helpful suggestions. Started back in this morning and WaryPuppy 5.5 booted right up and installed no problem... Sort of.

It's asking me to find the menu.lst file which should be in /boot, but is not. Should I create the file inside the directory that's supposed to contain it with the text I'm supposed to save? Created and saved the little text file in /boot, now running into issue described below.

Still a question; although I saved the file where and under the name it's supposed to be, the system won't boot from the hard drive...

No real rush, the drive has been reformatted and it's all over but the minor details at this point...

Or not. Puppy won't boot from the hard drive, I'm still getting an HP logo and an invalid boot sector error. Soooo, there's still a hidden portion of the drive that wasn't erased and is trying to find Windows.

It should be in the /boot/grub directory. Not sure if that's what you mean and just indicated /boot directory? If you installed Puppy, I would expect it to have created the menu.lst in the appropriate place.

Hello yancek,

Thank you for your reply.

I would have thought the directory and file would have been created as well.

Instead, it seems to want me to install GRUB, but won't let me proceed with the installation. It gets hung up during the creation dialogue and just loops endlessly back to the same initial screen.

I'd like to just delete the partition and start from scratch again, but...

The drive is mounted and won't unmount, even during boot.

The OS forced me to assign a PW so the drive could initially be mounted during boot.

If I don't enter the PW, I'm notified the drive could not be mounted and given some options. I try choosing the option to go to console and enter the command to unmount the drive:

#sudo umount /dev/sda1

But I get the same notification that I do if I try to unmount the drive while working from the desktop, that is the device is busy and can't be unmounted.

From the desktop, I've tried unmounting with the GUI controls and the console.

I would settle for a surefire way to once again delete and format a new partition, then I'll try the install again and go more slowly.

I don't use Puppy and haven't installed it for several years. As I remember it, the Grub installation process is very convoluted and has more steps than other distributions. Maybe they've change it?

I'm not sure about the rest of your last post. Are you able to actually boot Puppy on the hard drive? Seems not from your previous post. Are you using a CD/DVD with Puppy? You should be able to delete and/or format any partition. If you are trying to unmount a partition which you are booted to, you would expect the "busy" message.

Do you still have windows on one of the partitions?

Hello Yancek,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm not sure about the rest of your last post. Are you able to actually boot Puppy on the hard drive? No, I get an invalid boot sector error message Seems not from your previous post. Are you using a CD/DVD with Puppy? Yes, I have WaryPuppy 5.5 iso You should be able to delete and/or format any partition. I agree, I should be able to... If you are trying to unmount a partition which you are booted to, you would expect the "busy" message. I'm not able to unmount the drive, even during the initial stage of the boot process. The OS made me create a PW to allow the drive to be mounted, but even if I skip the PW, quit to console and try to unmount, no luck. It's this way even if I choose to boot from DVD.

Do you still have windows on one of the partitions? Not to my knowledge. I was initially able to delete all the existing partitions and format them to .3fs, but I think there must be some remnant, maybe on a hidden partition. The 40GB drive had only 37.2GB available even with all the visible partitions deleted, and before I formatted the drive...

Reading back over your earlier posts, you indicate that you have tried several Linux versions unsuccessfully as well as DBAN. Do you have a CD drive or a DVD drive or both? Are you burning to a CD? It is possible but very unlikely that they could all be bad downloads or bad burns. It is also possible that your CD or DVD drive could be bad or that there are loose connections on the cable. Have you checked all these?

And you have burned that iso file to a blank CD and selected the option to 'burn as an image', correct? Then booted the computer with the CD in the drive?

The installation of the Grub bootloader obviousl failed. The last time I installed Puppy which was several years ago, there were 7 steps just to install Grub. I don't know if they've changed that?

I'm not sure what you are trying to mount or why. You can't boot the installed Puppy so you are using the CD with Puppy and want to try to mount the partition on which you tried to install Puppy to view files?

When you installed Puppy, you should have been prompted upon reboot to save a pup_save.sfs file. Did you do that?

Hello Yancek,

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

Reading back over your earlier posts, you indicate that you have tried several Linux versions unsuccessfully as well as DBAN. Do you have a CD drive or a DVD drive or both? The drive on the old laptop (the one I'm trying to put Linux on) is DVD-ROM. I'm burning to DVD+RW discs with a desktop about a month old, using a DVD-RW drive. The desktop is running Windows 7, and I've used the native Windows image-burning software as well as downloading EasyISO and burning with that. I haven't tried burning all the discs twice, because honestly I don't think that's the problem. Are you burning to a CD? It is possible but very unlikely that they could all be bad downloads or bad burns. It is also possible that your CD or DVD drive could be bad or that there are loose connections on the cable. Have you checked all these? I haven't opened my desktop to see if the SATA cable is loose, but I know it's not damaged as they were also new and I put the tower together myself. I've built a number of desktops and I'm pretty conscientious about checking connections after I route the cables. The drive itself has performed flawlessly in other respects, and I have a Windows 7 laptop with better hardware that I checked some (not all) of the ISO discs, they booted to a stable Linux environment from the disc.

Quote:
Yes, I have WaryPuppy 5.5 iso
And you have burned that iso file to a blank CD and selected the option to 'burn as an image', correct? Then booted the computer with the CD in the drive? Correct, except I'm out of CDs so I'm wasting space on DVDs. Used Burn Image. Tried to boot the old laptop form all the CDs and only the Puppy made it to desktop and actually allowed me to delete the Windows and system partitions and reformat.

The installation of the Grub bootloader obviousl failed. The last time I installed Puppy which was several years ago, there were 7 steps just to install Grub. I don't know if they've changed that? Nah, it's still a nightmare of numerous options, none of which work, the dialogue box just loops back to the main choices over and over again.

I'm not sure what you are trying to mount or why. You can't boot the installed Puppy so you are using the CD with Puppy and want to try to mount the partition on which you tried to install Puppy to view files? No, actually, I'm trying to find a way to unmount the hard drive so I can then delete the current Puppy partition and try another fresh install.

When you installed Puppy, you should have been prompted upon reboot to save a pup_save.sfs file. Did you do that? Yes, and further it forced me to create a PW to allow the drive to mount during boot. But, even if I forego the PW and use the command prompt to unmount the drive during boot, I still get the message that it's busy. Also, the other lightweight Linux distros I've tried to boot from CD, for instance Legacy OS Mini (Puppy) won't boot to desktop successfully, and the ones that aren't based on Puppy are still not recognized as bootable media. Basically, not knowing a lot about Linux I seem to have painted myself into a corner.

If the partition on the hard drive is mounted, it should show as an icon on the Desktop if I remember correctly. You should be able to find where it is mounted if it mounts on boot by just opening a terminal and typing mount. Sample partition output from my machine:

In the example above, the partition is sda9 and the mount point is /mnt/data, so to unmount that I would type: umount /mnt/data

Modify that as it pertains to your system and see if you get any positive result. If you see an icon for a hard drive partition when you boot Puppy from the DVD, have you tried right-clicking to see if there is an unmount option? Also, if that partition is mounted, can you access it to see if you have the appropriate files, especially /boot/grub/ and the menu.lst file which should be in it. If the Grub install is just looping back when you try to install then I doubt there is anything there.

Have you only the one partition, sda1 on that drive?
You should actually be able to boot Puppy and reinstall to the same partition with the DVD and format the partition in the process. No need to delete it first. Unless that causes problems for some reason.

If the problem is in installing Grub and it repeatedly looping and never installing, I have some notes which worked for me and should work installing Puppy as the only OS. Let me know and I can post that.

If the partition on the hard drive is mounted, it should show as an icon on the Desktop if I remember correctly. You should be able to find where it is mounted if it mounts on boot by just opening a terminal and typing mount. Sample partition output from my machine:

Quote:
/dev/sda9 on /mnt/data type ext4 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,commit=0,user)
In the example above, the partition is sda9 and the mount point is /mnt/data, so to unmount that I would type: umount /mnt/data

Modify that as it pertains to your system and see if you get any positive result. Unfortunately, no. Device or resource is busy. If you see an icon for a hard drive partition when you boot Puppy from the DVD, have you tried right-clicking to see if there is an unmount option? There is but it is greyed out. Also, if that partition is mounted, can you access it to see if you have the appropriate files, especially /boot/grub/ and the menu.lst file which should be in it. There are a number of files containing the words "boot" and "grub", but I can't find that set of directories. The menu.lst file also did not exist at first. The OS popped up a Window with a few lines of text defining the drive and partition and told me to find menu.lst and add the text in. Since the file didn't exist I just took the relevant text out of the popup window and saved it as menu.lst in the appropriate folder. If the Grub install is just looping back when you try to install then I doubt there is anything there.

Have you only the one partition, sda1 on that drive? Yes, as it turns out that was probably one major mistake.
You should actually be able to boot Puppy and reinstall to the same partition with the DVD and format the partition in the process. No need to delete it first. Unless that causes problems for some reason. I've tried using the Install function on the desktop, and though it will take me through the process, the drive is still mounted and the partition cannot be deleted/moved/resized nor the drive formatted

If the problem is in installing Grub and it repeatedly looping and never installing, I have some notes which worked for me and should work installing Puppy as the only OS. Let me know and I can post that. It's worth a try if you don't mind, and thanks again.

When I booted the Puppy CD to install, there were two icons on the Desktop labelled sda1 and sda3. If you see this (sda1) you could try to open it. I'm surprised the umount option is greyed out as Puppy runs as root (administrator) all the time. No idea what that is about.

That, as I recall, would apply if you have another Linux operating system with a menu.lst file and the intention is for you to copy it to the menu.lst file of the other system.

No, I don't think so. Puppy and any Linux system can be placed on a single partition so I doubt that is the problem.

The information below is from notes that are several years old and I haven't used Puppy recently so if you don't see what I show below, then things have changed in Puppy. I would suggest taking notes in case something goes wrong you can review it later if something goes wrong.

I didn't use the Install icon on the Desktop. I don't know if it is the same as the method I used. What I did was to click on the Menu button in the lower left, mouse up to setup and then over to Puppy Universal Installer and click on it. You get a new window where you select the device on which to install. Internal (IDE or SATA) hard drive should be the correct choice in your case. You proceed making your selections in GParted Partition Manager and then proceed with the Install. You should get to an information page showing an option to Install Puppy to sda1. If everything is successful, you should get a window showing Puppy was successfully installed and you should see a tab at the bottom of the window: Install/update Grub. Click on it.

You should then get a new window with some information to read and at the bottom 2 options: Update and Install. Select Install. Another window opens indicating the grubconfig script will be run. Read it and click OK. Again, a new window to read with options Simple and Expert. Click on Simple to highlight it then click OK. The next window is the Frame Buffer window and just accept 'standard' the default and click OK. The following window will ask you where you want to put the Grub files. These would normally be put on the root filesystem partition. In your case, it should be sda1 and if sda1 is the only partition on the drive and is shown in the box on the page as highlighted, click OK. You will get yet another window to read and a box at the bottom in which you need to select the option "MBR install to master boot record". Since you have no other operating system and thus no bootloader, this is necessary or you will not be able to boot. Ignore the message "possibly unsafe" since you have no bootloader installed to make "unsafe". Click OK and after a short time, you should get a success message, click the OK button. You may then get a window with Yes/No option. Read it and click No and reboot. If it is not successful, repeat the process again carefully. If it still fails, I don't know what to say other than Good Luck!

Hello yancek and everyone else who replied to help,

First I'd like to thank everyone again for taking the time and effort to answer my questions.

Second, the system is now booting from hard drive and I'm looking forward to getting to know the OS better.

To resolve the issue I had with unmounting the hard drive was ridiculously easy. I deleted the warysave file that apparently told the OS that I was good to go and that it should lock down the hard drive. Once I did that, I was able to unmount the drive and delete the partition I made and create a new one for a fresh install.

Next, yancek, you were right, there was no boot manager installed, and even after I got the drive unmounted Grub would not work, at all. Grub4DOS, however, worked just fine and allowed me to install a boot manager to the partition.

But, I still couldn't get the computer to boot from hard drive, so I went to the PuppyLinux forum and read a very thorough guide for that "breed" of Linux here. It didn't coincide exactly with what I was doing but did help me get up and running pretty quickly.

The boot problem was caused by my failure to set the boot flag for the partition. Simple as that, but I didn't know enough to even ask the question.

So, again, thank you very much for your time and patience, and I hope I didn't waste anybody's time. If I did, it was not intentional.