BIG PROBLEM
Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: BIG PROBLEM
started by: dannyjr088
Posted by dannyjr088 on July 01 2005,15:02
Alright I'm two for two I have sucessfully stumped both the toshiba technical support line as well as an authorized dealer who could only tell me its gonna cost $75 go figure. The laptop I have is a toshiba A60-S166. It has a Pentium 4, 764MB Ram, 40Gb HDD, Atheoros Wifi, and some other stuff that i dont think is really important. But anyways the problem I have is that my dsl keeps having a "kernel panic" which isnt a big deal if I could boot from cd. However, there is one problem...I can't because I can't open BIOS to change order of booting. I have a BIOS password on but I know it and I enter it and it says "System check. Press[F1]". So I press F1 to open BIOS and unfortuantely damn LILO boots up instead. I'm completely lost and have no idea what to do. Any ideas?Thanks
Posted by ned on July 01 2005,15:58
Are you able to boot from the floppy? I had the same problem with an old version of SuSe that would ignore the CD boot and head straight to the lilo, but using the DSL floppy boot fixed that. (I was able to enter my BIOS settings and set it to boot floppy, then cd, then hd, but the damn lilo still somehow got in before the cd.)As to the kernel panic... I got that too (installing on a Fujitsu lifebook), which I discovered was because the CD I was trying to boot from was burned as data, not an image. Of course, I'm somewhat of an idiot, so that might not be your problem.
Posted by dannyjr088 on July 02 2005,01:52
Well a floppy is one thing I havent tried however i dont have a floppy drive on my laptop so it seems i might have to search for one that can plug in through usb however i dont know if it will start up in time but its worth a shot.thanks
danny
Posted by ned on July 02 2005,02:33
Before you try and find a floppy...You can also edit the lilo config (lilo.conf) file to add your CD-ROM as a boot device (I think...never tried; could be very wrong) -- boot=/dev/hdc (if your cdrom drive is "hdc").
Or you could uninstall lilo...
Posted by tjm4fun on July 02 2005,04:58
I have a couple of old toshiba laptops. they can be a royal pain to get inot the bios with lilo installed. Usually I power the unit on holding down the esc key. this causes a keyboard error, and forces it to go into bios. the password complicates it even further.
Worse case, remove the hdd from the toshiba. and power on, hold the esc key. maybe that'll work for you...
Posted by andrewphoto on July 02 2005,10:53
I downloaded the latest BIOS from Toshiba, extracted it,and read the README.Says that you can use diskette drive (internal, USB, or PCMCIA.)
Very likely an external USB floppy drive will work. I worked in motherboard repair for a Chinaman and we used these all the time. Inexpensive Packard Bell/Matsumi should do the trick (maybe 30 bucks.)
Would be neat to save your pennies though, and do something neat like obtain a VERSATILE Compact Flash PCMCIA adapter (10 bucks or less,) and a Compact Flash card (two a penny.)
As for 'customising' your bios, I reckon this is 'advanced,' something I aspire to do, reckon I'll need to do some heavy googling to learn about that.
For now I boot USB-ZIP via internal floppy, and I'm quite happy with that.
Reckon ascertaining whether or not PCMCIA instead will work, is of value to know, aka Linux PCMCIA 'boot floppy.'
Perhaps Toshiba Support can answer that question exactly. I spoke with one of those guys the other week.
Turned out he was in India, bright guy, helpful.
I hope I might have been helpful.
You can definately burn a bios to cd and do it that way.