Laptops :: HDD install on laptop that won't boot CD

Tony: you're welcome. :o) Hope things have settled for you at home.

In the last day or two I've done a bit of reading and as Brian said, GRUB is way better for dual booting with Windows, but I haven't played with it. I just went with whatever I picked since I didn't really know what the benefits of GRUB vs LiLo were and I wasn't dual booting on the laptop.
It might be useful to watch this other thread regarding the same problem in case an answer gets posted there:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=10161
Although larkl says that apparently lilo.conf can't be edited in a frugal install?

Since you've only just installed to the other partition, I was wondering whether you could either run the installation script again since it's using the DSL image from your windows partition? Failing that use the DSL boot floppy to boot the Windows frugal DSL image (using your boot switches to select fromhd=/dev/hda1 (assuming your windows partition is the first one on your primary drive)) and re-install selecting GRUB as the boot loader might work?

Brian can probably give you a better way, but I wondered if doing it as above would work?

Cheers and beers!
Sarah

Yeah!! Success!! - well sort of.
My daughter's still in hospital but I've managed to get some time to work on this.
First of all, I decided to boot from the Windows floppy and run fdisk /mbr to re-instate the system as it was,
Then I booted DSL from the floppy and followed the instruction to do a Grub install. Great! it all worked and now I have an old laptop that will boot and run either Windows or Linux.

Then I decide to take out the floppy drive and put in the CD drive.
What did Alice say when she went thriugh the looking glass? "Curioser and curioser" I think. Well now I am in Wonderland too and things are getting curioser and curioser.
When I try to boot the system with the CD drive in place, GRUB starts up and gives me the same choices it did previouslly i.e. with the floppy drive in place but no disk in the drive.
However, now it just crashes after entering the required mode.
I get the following messages (some of them in brief):
OK, bootingthe kernel
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010[<00000000>] Not tainted
Eflags: ....
eax: .....
esi: .....
ds: ......
Process swapper .........
Stack .......
Call Trace ......
Code: bad EIP value
<0> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init !

I've looked at the GRUB command and it says

kernel /boot/linux24 root= /dev/hda2 quiet vga=788 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal

which is exactly the same when I boot with the floppy drive connected.
And just to confuse the issue, Windows boots OK.
No wonder "Alice in Wonderland" used to be required reading for first time programmers way back in th '60s when I first got into computers.
If anyone wants to contribute to this thread you can be assured you are most welcome!
Tony
P.S I'm off to the hospital again soon so may not see your response for a while.
Tony

Well! Some ( doubtful) progress.
First of all, my daughter is out of hospital, so while she is recuperating (and monopolising my desktop) I've spent many hours on the CD problem.
First thing I discovered, after a lot of searching, was that the Frugal install had NOT installed to the /dev/hda2 partition as I thought but was running from the Windows C: CD copy that I had put there.
So I went ahead and did a full hard disk install. This went to /dev/hda2 like it was supposed to. I know 'cos it asked me and then took ten minutes to copy all the files over.
It then asked me if I wanted to use grub or lilo to which I reponded grub.
However, I notice that this grub does not give me the choice of booting Windows, even though it asked if Windows existed on my primary partition. Strange!
Anyway, having now got DSL installed on the hard drive, I went ahead and swapped over my CD and floppy to see if I could now see the CD.
But - booting crashed with exactly the same message I detailed in the previous post.
So now I tried to boot some other live distributions from the CD, namely Puppy, Mepis, Ubuntu and Vector Linux.
As almost expected, they all hung except the Vector Linux, which booted up happily and immediately started to install itself.
So now I have DSL, Puppy, Mepis and Ubuntu live distributions which just can't be seen by my system PLUS Windows 98SE and Vector Linux which can.
I can happily run DSL with the floppy disk attached, but as I want to use the CD to transfer files larger than 1.44Mb, I not sure where to go from here.
Happy Christmas all
Tony

I have an old Compaq LTE 5300, I had a huge problem with the CDROM because it was defective and would crash DSL on boot...it started as a long boot delay..then slowly turned into a complete kernel crash...

It might be your CDROM had finally gone the way of the dodo!

Brian
AwPhuch

Hi Brian
You could be right, but for the fact that it will boot both the Windows and the Vector disks.
In fact, I have re-installed Windows 3 times already and I've booted the Vector disk twice in the last hour.
Tony

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