No BIOS on ancient laptop.
 

I have a Compaq Armada 1750 with no visible BIOS menu.It currently has windows 2000 professional. I'm going to be giving this to my son. I want to install maybe mint or something else. It only has a 10g hard drive and I think 128 of memory. My phone is faster than it lol. I was hoping I can run it off the USB instead of the hard drive. I'm not sure where to start with no bios menu. He has the little Kano raspberry pi but he's kind of out grown it.

There must be some way to get to a BIOS ("pre-boot") menu on the box. Maybe do a Google (or DuckDuckGo) search to see if you can find a PDF copy of the owner's manual.

You shouldn't need to run it off of a USB drive, and you'll need to check and see if it can in fact be booted from USB.

Rest assured that you most-certainly can run Linux on such a "puny" (sic) machine. Heck, I ran Linux for almost two decades on a laptop that came with Windows-95! ("Old Dobbin" today lives on, only in a disk drive...) When I installed a suitably-stripped-down [Gentoo ...] Linux distro on it, the machine was positively speedy. :)

I can only get into a "advanced options menu" after pushing f8 and I can get into hardware profile/ configuration recovery menu

F12 I believe for Compaq

Nope I've been trying to get into the BIOS for months now. Tried EVERYTHING I can think of. F10 F12 F8 gets me that advanced menu, hitting space bar gets to that configuration recovery menu. Every forum I've read says something about the BIOS is partitioned or something. I just wanted to know how to install linux remove windows and all without the bios.

In what way has your son outgrown a Raspberry Pi? The Pi should be faster than a Pentium II.

If I remember correctly a P2 can not boot from USB and it only has a 1.0 which will be very slow. As stated it can not run mint or anything with a modern desktop.

My son really wants a laptop and he really wants linux. His pi is kano which is very kid friendly, it doesn't have a flash player and this isn't an option to get one for kano. I've been trying to get one on it and there isn't a flash player that will work for it. Am I able to download linux and install it and then remove windows?

Remove the disk drive from the laptop and let it try to boot. That should bet you into the BIOS. Once there, you should find an option like "Fast boot" or "Ultra fast boot" that you can disable. That should allow enough time to press <Del>, <Esc>, or whatever key gets you into the BIOS setup from power-on.

Removing that did nothing tried booting it and pressing the f keys and esc

Here ya go. I did this on a compaq 1540dm that was Windows 95 vintage.

http://yatsite.blogspot.com/2008/09/...indows-95.html

If your compaq is as ancient as you say it is. It should be able to boot off of floppy 1st.

Then tell the floppy to boot the cd drive. PLOP floppy should handle this also. ios

On old compaqs. The bios sat in the hard drive. If someone nuked the hard drive. Bye bye bios menu and functions.

You might be able to google search and find the original bios and install to floppy instructions and do that 1st before trying what I did. Maybe, kinda, sorta.

Edit. With your specs. Puppy 4.12 series or http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2395 or a 2.14 series http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/

Also a possibilty is http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=83550

I ran this on a 128MB sd card for awhile

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72576

My screenshot off that card

http://postmyimage.com/img2/997_128MBSD.jpg

Be sure to read the minimum hardware requirements for Flash Player:

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashp...ech-specs.html

In my opinion, your Compaq Armada is not the right hardware for the task. :(

Maybe no 640K memory free? http://forum.dvdtalk.com/tech-talk/1...50-laptop.html

If you get this far then you are past bios. "a "advanced options menu" after pushing f8 an"

Hi...

From what I see here, that's correct. You might be able to go here and choose the correct model (and model number) of your laptop and see if the BIOS program is offered for it. For example, if I choose the first entry on that list (the "Compaq Armada 1750 nb 6300/T/4000/D/0/1,") I get a page that asks me for the driver language and operating system used, I get another list that offers to BIOS files, one of which says "System ROMPaq." :)

Regards...

You can get by not using flash player by using smtube instead.

But a current Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, and any other java , flash heavy browser. Forget about it.

Dillo and Links 2 browsers and maybe old qtweb browsers or netsurf , maybee? Might work OK.

It is how I roll on Pentium 3 , low ram gear. I sold my Pentium 2 gear after I installed Linux on them. School kids wanted buy the kool credentials of having a linux laptop.

http://yatsite.blogspot.com/search?q=fixing+old+gear

http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmc...01120750-1.pdf

something on BIOS in that one.

this one
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/tech-talk/1...50-laptop.html
says

searched Google with these keywords.

compaq armada 1750 bios access


you may want to try that and look for more on that subject