No CD, floppy (almost working)

Forum: HD Install
Topic: No CD, floppy (almost working)
started by: jfath

Posted by jfath on Mar. 26 2005,00:42

I have an old HP Omnibook 800CT laptop with no CD or floppy drives and a 1.3GB HD. I pulled the HD, put it in another machine, booted the DSL CD and did an install to the HD. Then, I moved the drive back to the original laptop. So far, so good...

When X starts on the laptop, the desktop is un-readable. The graphics chipset is a NeoMagic MagicGraph 128 PCI.

Looking through the forums, There seem to be possible solutions that have to do with pressing F2 on the boot menu and entering some options, but on an HD install, the F2 menu isn't available, correct?

How do I enter boot options when booting from an HD?
Are there some keys I can press (blindly) to quit X when I'm in the bad state?

Thanks for your help.

Jerry

Posted by tenexmag on Mar. 26 2005,16:35

Ctrl+alt+del Kills X.
It brings you back to the lower level command line.

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 26 2005,19:15

As does CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.

You can add and remove boot options by editing your lilo.conf file and changing the append line. Then re-run lilo as user root.

Search the forums for keyword "lilo.conf" and search ALL FORUMS and FROM THE BEGINING to get more info.

Posted by jfath on Mar. 26 2005,20:52

Thanks guys.

I ended up getting it working, but the palette was ugly and the built-in mouse was erratic. I installed XFree86 and everything is great now. Gotta love DSL - my 8 year old laptop is useful again.

Jerry