Laptops :: No boot with DSL

I have made the CD-ROM drive my boot drive and when I boot the computer, Windows starts, af if there is no DSL to be booted.

There seems to be an autoexec.bat missing in the root directory of the CD image. Is that normal?

My laptop is a:
Toshiba 1640-CDT (AMD Mobile K2-2), 491 Mhz, 192 MB RAM, 6 GB HD, running Windows 98SE, with unofficial Service Pack.

I've tried DSL embedded, but that was soooo slow. An application needed 2 minutes to start after double clicking it on the GUI Desktop. And the boot from HD took around 15 minutes.

René

Edit: I found out what I did wrong: copied the files instead of burning the ISO image. It now works like a charm. I will try to partition the laptop's harddisk tomorrow with free Partition Logic and see if I can put DSL on it, using the tohd option and later reboot using the fromhd option.

I want to be able to run Python 2.4.2 on the laptop, so I can check what my Python apps look like in a Linux box.

I tried Partition Logic 0.61 and it crashed on boot. Because I have read comments from others having the same problem, I have sent an e-mail message to the creator, hoping that he will offer me a fix or workaround to this problem.

I give him one week to send me a reply and otherwise I'll be forced to try one of the commercial vendors for a partition software solution.

BTW I understand you can use DSL on a unpartitioned harddisk, using the dsl fromhd=/dev/hda1 boot option, but this renders HDA unmountable and I want to be able to use both my harddisk and CD-ROM player as mountable devices, so I can store locally and read data and programs from CD-ROM.

René

DSL will recognize and write to FAT formatted hard drives. With that in mind, you may choose to simply boot and run DSL from the CD and use the hard drive as your backup device and a place to store downloaded applications. That way you don't need to create any new partitions or reformat anything.
If you do decide you want to get rid of Windows altogether, or keep it and make a new partition on the same disk, then you can use the program called parted.dsl to shrink the Windows partition and then create a new partition from the free space to put DSL on. I recommend the Frugal install because it just works very well on my old laptop.

I tried parten from the parten.dsl repository (my PC is not connected to the internet, so I had to manually install it by copying the downloaded parten.dsl file from a CD-ROM disk to the PC's harddisk), but at the moment it is just too difficult to grasp for me. All those commands inside parten and no menu; very frustating. And it seems you have to unmount the harddisk, otherwise access is denied.

If anything can go wrong, it does go wrong with me. So isn't there a more foolproof method than with parten, cfdisk and grub frugal harddisk install? All this technospeak is very alien to me. I don't want to learn what is under the hood, but just drive the d*** thing.

If you don't want to learn to drive it, then DSL is probably not the best distro for you. You need something more automated, like Mepis lite, or Ubuntu, or SuSe, or Mandriva.

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