Guest RedWraith Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 Hi ! Yesterday I installed the Mandriva Linux 2005 LE Edition on an old laptop, just because a good friend of mine told me, that mandriva is a very nice distribution. So I downloaded and installed it, but when i tried to boot it the first time, the laptop just prompted me to "Insert Boot-Disk and press any Key". I thought that one of the images could be broken while downloaded, so I checked the md5sum. To be sure of it, I downloaded the images again, burned them down and installed them again (this time without making much konfiguration, just in case it was because of that) and the laptop is still not booting it. Btw the HDD is being auto-detected by the system and the boot order is configured to HDD first. I couldn't find out the Producer of the Laptop, because there where no logos on the outside and the sticker undeath was too damaged to get any information from it. All i know is that the Laptop is a 300MHZ Pentium II with 128MB RAM. Does someone has a solution to my "little" Problem ? I am neither very experienced with laptops nor with installing linux (Only used a preinstalled linux at school), so please explain as simple as you can ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 How did you burn the ISO images to CD? And anyway it's highly unlikely to have Mandriva running decently (or at all ) on PII-300/128M. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest RedWraith Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 How did you burn the ISO images to CD? - Well... using Nero ? ;) I told it to burn an image to CD rom. And anyway it's highly unlikely to have Mandriva running decently (or at all ) on PII-300/128M. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> - But it is not impossible ? :D Well, I just want to take a look at it, so I can think about installing it on my main pc. btw i found out that the laptop is a Clevo 1300P. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 Get sure you have an up-to-date Nero version, as some older ones wouldn't burn ISO images properly. The way you chose to burn it is the correct one. You *may* be able to run Mandriva on that machine, but definitely not KDE/Gnome, and almost certaily not XFCE4 as well. Pick a very light windowmanager (IceWM or Fluxbox) as your default. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 Umm.... Mandy can be installed on such a machine (minimum is 64 MB Ram with a simple pentium processor. So a Pentium with 75 Mhz would theoretically work, too, but this is theory only. I haven't verified that ;)) and it sould run without any major problems. KDE and Gnome are not good choices (although they might run, they will be very slow), but XCFE should not give you any problems. There are actually many possibilities. You could e.g. run Fluxbox or Enlightenment, ROX or IceWM, PekWM and others. Just check the corresponding websites first in order to get an idea of the environment you want to choose. Are you sure that you installed the bootloader in the Masterbootrecord of your harddisk? If yes, check in your BIOS if your harddisk is set to LBA mode. If not, enable it and try again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest RedWraith Posted October 19, 2005 Report Share Posted October 19, 2005 (edited) Are you sure that you installed the bootloader in the Masterbootrecord of your harddisk? If yes, check in your BIOS if your harddisk is set to LBA mode. If not, enable it and try again. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yes it is installed on the MBR, but there is no LBA option in the bios (or at least i cant find it -.- the bios is probably old and i have never seen it before). It seems the only way to detect drives is to let the pc autodetect them on startup. I've already searched for a newer bios version since i noticed that the version on the machine is from 1996, but i couldn't find anyone. I'll post some more information about the laptop and the bios on there, but i'm currently reinstalling it once more, because i want to install the bootloader to a disk. EDIT I reinstalled it and now with the bootloader on a floppy disk its booting fine. It took about 2 minutes to start madriva without any gui thingy, which in my opinion, is not that bad for a 300MHZ pc. Well my problem is that the bootloader is not started, as long as it is on the HDD, but the reason is unclear to me. Somebody got an idea ? Edited October 19, 2005 by RedWraith Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 What boot loader did you choose to use? Was it LILO or GRUB? I heard of problems with GRUB sometimes failing because of one thing or another. If so, maybe use LILO instead as you might experience better success booting direct from the hard disk that way. If you're already using LILO, then maybe try GRUB instead to see if it helps..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest RedWraith Posted October 20, 2005 Report Share Posted October 20, 2005 I don't know which bootloader it is and i couldn't remember, that i hat the option to change anything else than the location where it will be installed. Well I will try to find out which i am currently using and will install the other one as soon as im back from school. But can I install a new bootloader without loosing the possibility to boot from my floppy disk ? what do i have to do exactly ? Thanks for the help so far, you guys helped me alot, even if you don't know how :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jglen490 Posted October 21, 2005 Report Share Posted October 21, 2005 Hi ! Yesterday I installed the Mandriva Linux 2005 LE Edition on an old laptop, just because a good friend of mine told me, that mandriva is a very nice distribution. So I downloaded and installed it, but when i tried to boot it the first time, the laptop just prompted me to "Insert Boot-Disk and press any Key". <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So you got it installed, but you are getting an error that indicates the BIOS is looking for a bootable device. Did you install the bootloader (i.e., GRUB/LILO) to the MBR of the hard drive or to the boot sector of the first partition? I believe the error is from the BIOS when it cannot find a boot able device. This happens when there is no boot code in the MBR. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted October 21, 2005 Report Share Posted October 21, 2005 I don't know which bootloader it is and i couldn't remember, that i hat the option to change anything else than the location where it will be installed. Well I will try to find out which i am currently using and will install the other one as soon as im back from school. But can I install a new bootloader without loosing the possibility to boot from my floppy disk ? what do i have to do exactly ? Thanks for the help so far, you guys helped me alot, even if you don't know how :D <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Open the MCC. There is a section (I think it's startup or something like that) where you can specify the bootloader, grub or lilo, and you can choose to reinstall it in the MBR of your harddisk with it. It will still leave your box bootable from a floppy disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest RedWraith Posted October 22, 2005 Report Share Posted October 22, 2005 I switched to Grub and its working finally :D Thanks for Help guys, nice forum :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.