Hardware Talk :: Why does my laptop only want to boot win98?



For some weird and unknown reason(to me at least) my Gateway Solo 9100 will not boot from any livecd.This thing also refuses to boot win95,win2000,winxp(and thankfully)win vista.I made a bootable rescue cd that boots into win98 dos and that won't even work.The only cd this laptop would boot is the win98se thats it.The 9100 has to be one of the quirkiest lappys I've seen yet. The won't play DVDs(smoothly)yet its got 200mb of ram and 366 pII chip. The DVD rom has in the same unit a 120super disk floppy drive.How long was the 120 on the market before it died? not long. I used freedos and still could not access the cdrom drive even with the atapi drivers. My dsl is installed to the hard-drive(hda1)debian style and hda5 is my fat32 music partition.I would love to be able to boot slax or another live cd but,this thinkgs screwier than Tom Cruise on Opra's couch. Idid move enough music to my roomies winxp machine with samba to free up the needed 200mb for slax,but when I go and copy the cd over to hda5(I can use loadlin)but some files don't transfer from the cd all the way, like slax.mo wich is around 16mb only gets 600kwhile other files gets transfered fully. does any know what could be going on? I did make sure BIOS is set to load the CD first,but it acts like there is nothing in the drive and goes striat into grub.Ijust find it weird that only the win98cd would load.I now regret that burn the windows disk party,and sadly to say that win98se is no more.
Quote (meltdown_override @ Mar. 07 2007,22:10)
The won't play DVDs(smoothly)yet its got 200mb of ram and 366 pII chip. The DVD rom has in the same unit a 120super disk floppy drive.... I did make sure BIOS is set to load the CD first,but it acts like there is nothing in the drive and goes striat into grub.Ijust find it weird that only the win98cd would load.I now regret that burn the windows disk party,and sadly to say that win98se is no more.

1. Are you sure the CD/DVD drive operates correctly? You suggested some buggy performance. It's not uncommon for a wonky drive to work with some media and not others (see 3).
2. Are you sure it's not dirty and therefore not reading CDs/DVDs correctly? Are you sure the disks are clean and work on other drives?
3. Did you burn to high quality media or did you use el cheapo CDs?

Any of the above could result in a CD not being read at boot and then GRUB or whatever bootloader you use would use whatever default is available. I don't think it's a Gateway hardware issue since hardware is fairly standard -- not to mention manufactured by another company (all the Gateways I've worked on have been loaded with Samsung drives) -- regardless of who assembles it.
yea, I tried everything. Even the commercially pressed winxp wont boot from cd. Only win98se cds would boot. You think it might be something in the BIOS that looks for win98se boot scripts? just weird. I could understand if it could'nt boot any cd,but to only boot the 98se and nothing else.Now Im sure its a BIOS thing. As I don't trust the a: drive to read correclty either,is there an alternate way to upgrade the bios without using the internal floppy?
I think I just found my problem. The DVD-rom was made my matshita.I never heard of that company before.

original here.