gmac Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 I have been given a laptop, (it's an ex company one) it used to have windows on it but this has been wiped now ther is no operating system on it it opens up to C/>. There is no floppy disc, but I thought I would be able to install mandrake on it booting of the CD rom. I can get in to set up and change it to boot from the CD, I think, but the CD does not seem to work. So far as I know it was working just no longer a high enough spec. Before I give up and bin it any suggestions. Please be kind I have never tried this kind of thing before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fissy Posted January 17, 2004 Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 put the cd in and restart, and try holding down c as the system comes on... it might work... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted January 17, 2004 Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 What laptop and hardware do you have. All the info you can think of helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted January 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 Toshoba 480 cdt satellite pro pentium 2 6gb 16 mb of ram. Ffisst tried that didn't work. I I can get in to setup pressing esc at start up, change boot priority but this doesn't seem to work. CD itself does not seem to work, although so far as I know it was. I was intending to get a box made up so I xould play around with linux without risking my essential computer- I work at home. I have reached the shallow depths of my knowledge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted January 18, 2004 Report Share Posted January 18, 2004 Does the bios recognize the cdrom correctly? Maybe its an LG rom and it got fried before you got it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted January 18, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2004 I don't know. I am a total novice at this I don't really know how to get it ti check. I press esc while to get in to set up and that about sums up my knowledge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roland Posted January 18, 2004 Report Share Posted January 18, 2004 Hi, If you have only MS DOS and you can't boot on the CD or make your CD ROM work, the only and easiest way I see to communicate and reinstall, say Win98SE at first, is Interlink. Do you have INTERLNK.EXE and INTERSVR.EXE (or .SYS) in your C:\DOS or C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND ? then you will need a parallel port, a special cable or an ordinary parallel Centronic cable with an adapter and an other PC running INTERSVR. If you never did it before that's quite a work, so better give me your laptop before throwing it to the bin ;) roland Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mandrake_alf Posted January 22, 2004 Report Share Posted January 22, 2004 Well.... before you 'bin' it, give me a shout... I know some needy students that could make good use of it, linux installed or not.. (although I admit I'd do almost anything to avoid the *doe$ route) :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kfoss Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 What type of CD are you using? Is it a production CD or a CD-R(W)? I know that some early CD drives have serious issues recognizing burned CDs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkVejita Posted January 29, 2004 Report Share Posted January 29, 2004 I have had this problem on older laptops as well. If you can, I would try and boot from any other bootable CD (I typically make a standard one in Nero or similar burning programs first). If you make a bootable disc, burn at as slow of a speed as possible. Some older drives can't read the pits burned to a disc if it is done too fast. If you can only get to a dos prompt (C:\), you don't want to format the drive until you can find a way to boot to CD. However, if you can see the CD rom in DOS mode, you might be able to use a dos install method, check out http://www.tldp.org/ (the Linux Documentation Project), as I believe it has information on doing this. Also, I am sure that others here can give you assistance. Can you read the CD from the dos prompt? (check for dos drivers on the harddrive). Hope this gets you pointed in the right direction. Vejita Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmac Posted February 7, 2004 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2004 Got ot to work. Turns out I had a faulty installation disc (suse) I tried my mandrake one and it worked perfectly. Only thing is I coked up the installation and get get the graphical interface. I have tried SU then XFdrake but thgis is not working. When I put in SU it just stays with c/ I know it is something simple I am doing wrong but I can't for the life of me work it out. Any suggestions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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