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Installing mandriva on Compaq Presario


Rowan
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Hello all

I was recently given an old Presario sr1300an and I have been trying to install Mandriva on it but with little luck. It will accept Mandrake 9.1 ok but nothing later. It will read the core update disc for 2006.1 but not the main iso disc. The disc drive does not seem to even see a disc in the drive (with later distros). But it did reformat and install ok with XP.

 

Is this problem caused because this is an older machine, maybe the iso format has changed since Mandrake days or maybe the bios. Is there any easy way to get it to 'see' the later model discs or am I stuck with 9.1?

 

Any advice is welcome

Rowan

 

PS This will be a gift for my sister so it is not super critical but a later distro would be nice - and I have always been a Mandrake/Mandriva fan

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Hello Rowan.

Maybe if you try Mageia-4 you might have better luck, especially since it came from the earlier Mandrivas. Because you are already familiar with Mandrake/Mandriva you will feel quite at home with Mageia.

I should point out that Mageia was started with a big swag of the great and respected programmers who left or were made redundant by the Mandriva shenagigans at the time.

Many current Members of Mageia are still great faithfuls here at MUB.

Anyhow give it a try, you could be pleasently surprised.

 

Cheers. John.

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There could be a couple of things here. You say it's an old machine? So it's possible it only has a CD-ROM drive, rather than a DVD-ROM drive. Could it be that the later versions that you have burned are DVD's and not CD's?

 

Alternatively, it could always be a bad burn, or corrupted ISO download, and hence the problem with not being able to read the disks that you install.

 

EDIT:

 

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00282472&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&product=446896

 

from here it looks like it just has a CD-RW drive, so if you're attempting to start from DVD's, that will not work and might be the source of your problem. If using CD's for later versions, then I guess a bad burn or corrupted ISO download. Verify the ISO with the md5sum, and if incorrect download and burn again.

 

The other alternative, if there are no CD ISO images for the distro that you want to install (which can be the case), just replace the CD-RW with a DVD-RW, and then you're done. Best bet will be to take out the one you have in there, verify the type of connection (I expect IDE), and make sure you get a DVD drive with IDE. A lot of them now are SATA, which because this is an old machine, isn't going to work.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have finally had a chance to follow this up and the problem was that I needed a dvd drive - yes the standard drive is only a cd drive. I have installed a dvd unit and it is all good now.

 

The only other bug is that it is very slow but I reckon this is because modern distros are ram hungry and this machine has only 1gb - I will chuck in another gig and that should do it.

 

Thanks for all the advice.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Since my last entry I have been trying to install 2010.2 . The installation goes ok but, upon initial boot-up, I am getting what looks like the Mandriva home page. It appears automatically and is not in a browser so I have not been able to close it to get to the normal desktop. I have tried rebooting again but it still appears and no amount of button pushing makes it go away.

 

Does anybody know why it appears automatically, and how to get past it to get to the desktop?? Also how to make it stay away and not reappear upon the next start-up?

 

Thanks Rowan

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