Can someone explain how it is that so much can be loaded from a CD drive that is supposedly undetectable?
You know, I have a similar problem with an old laptop that I dust off every now and then to mess with. I can't get it to boot at all no matter what I try.
Difference is that it doesn't have a working cdrom. I boot it with a tomsrtbt floppy, and it loads the whole thing but then seems to crap out when trying to mount the floppy drive.SYSLINUX is a different way to load up linux from a bootable CDROM. It is also used for linux boot floppy disks.
Some computers, usually older ones, will not boot with ISOLINUX but can use SYSLINUX.Status update... I bought an external DVD drive and successfully booted a Kubuntu live CD from it; it detected my hardware and now I'm writing this message from the live CD! And I notice that the names of Linux distros are red... apparently Konquerer has a spell-checker built in?!?!
Knoppix wouldn't start (couldn't mount CD bla bla), and I haven't tried DSL yet (I was just so happy to see something work that I had to write this message :P)
Unfortunately, I cannot mount my hard drive; there are no /dev/hda* files. I would have bought a new motherboard already, but they were out of stock. The oddest thing is that while two Linux distros won't recognize my hard drives, a simple Win98 DOS disk can see the FAT32 partitions! Unfortunately, it does me no good because my main partition is NTFS.
Perhaps there's a compatibility setting I could use to make it see the hard drive?Okay, I finallly go the time and tried the syslinux.iso.
Again, it stops dead immediately after it says the USB is being managed by "hotplug". Thats it.
The Toshiba M45 I'm running this on is fairly new (less than a year old) and the only thing that I can think of is the super multi dvd drive?
Please - anyone - help???Ok - I've now tried disabling all the hardware. (ie. nousb etc) Nothing helped.
I tried failsafe mode and it said that it couldn't find the Knoppix filesystem, so it was dropping me down to a limited shell.