i have an old pacard bell computer that i have been playing around with this computer has a 133 MHz intel pentium processor and 48128 KB of ram it has an old seagate hard drive with 1032 MB this computer was given to me by my stepfather just for something to play with because it no longer worked. I have come to find out that it didn't work because the harddrive that was in it was seized right up(somehow?) anyway i put a different hard drive in it(the seagate i mentioned above)which i found in my old computer that no longer works(i smashed the motherboard to pieces out of frustration). Them i removed the floppy drive and threw in a dvd rom drive that i got a few years back. I am trying run this computer on either Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux but the problem is i cant get this computer to boot the cdr that i put the distro on. I have set my bios to boot from cdrom first but it just says please wait when it starts to load, then it never does anything I can hear the disc starts to spin faster then it just slows back down and stops all the while it just says please wait on my screen. what am i doing wrong? is there something else i need to setup, or do i just need to use a floppy drive? Please any info about this will be greatly appreciated.
no, you shold be able to boot from CDr, but, with it being an old system it may not boot from CDr, but, if you can set it to boot from CDr, it should boot, are you 100% sure the DVD drive works, it should be compatible with your system because PATA drives are backward compatible how did you burn the .iso to CDr ?
I,ve had that problem with older boards like socket 7 and earlier socket A. If you put a newer CDRW-DVD-ROM or DVD burner drive they wont boot off a CD for anything. Take it out and put a older 5 or 6 year old CD-ROM drive in and it will boot off a CD just fine. Dont know if its a conflict with the older bios and newer drives or what. I still have a old socket A board that is that way, it will only boot to a CD-ROM drive. If you burned the ISO correct you might try just using a standard CD-ROM drive.
thanks i will try it with an older cd rom drive and see if that works. the drive i am trying to use should work but i have no real way of testing it i burned the iso in ubuntu by right clicking and clicking write to disc. i know this iso must be burned correct because it boots in my laptop no prob.
ok i tried to boot it with a couple different older cdrom drives but i have had no luck so far. i have heard from a friend that i may need to install dos from a floppy and format the hard drive with fdisk before i will be able to boot Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux. can anybody confirm this?
I think hell will freeze over before any Linux distro will depend on DOS to do anything!! You will be able to partition your HDD(s) from the installation disk you of your chosen distro.
:agree: but it's not the distro it's the users choice, it would have to be very very cold in hell for me to have to rely on DOS & usually the format & partitioning are done by the LiveCD SBM is one way to go, and XOSL can also boot a CD & although i've never used either, i believe XOSL (Extended Operating System Loader) is easier to use
