Puppy won't boot from CD on IBM Thinkpad w/64MB RAM (Solved)

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dogberry
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Joined: Tue 28 Jun 2005, 12:30

Puppy won't boot from CD on IBM Thinkpad w/64MB RAM (Solved)

#1 Post by dogberry »

Hi,

I have downloaded and burned both Puppy 1.02 and 1.03 and used both successfully on several machines. However, I have an old IBM Thinkpad (Pentium 233, 64 MB RAM, 5GB HD) with the BIOS configured to boot from the CDROM. When I put puppy in the drive and start it up I get to the first line:
isolinux 2.13 2004-12-14 isolinux: 0142228B
and then it stops with a blinking cursor for ever. The CDROM drive seems to work OK for other things.

Any ideas what could be keeping my from booting any further?

Thanks

Guest

#2 Post by Guest »

I had the same problem, it came from not having a boot sector. i used USB disc and when i had it formatted as USB-ZIP there was no boot sector and i got the cursor forever. I reformatted as USB-HDD and it had a boot sector so when i installed syslinux it worked. Don't know how this applies but maybe of some help.

Rich
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 19:00
Location: Middlesbrough - UK

#3 Post by Rich »

Does the CD drive boot any other disks?

I had a CD drive a while back that worked fine ( or appeared to ) , but it just wouldn't bootload. Replaced it and the new one worked fine.


Rich

dogberry
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Joined: Tue 28 Jun 2005, 12:30

Tried "boot2pup" floppy

#4 Post by dogberry »

As a follow up to my previous question about not being able to start Puppy on my old Thinkpad:

I downloaded "boot2pup" floppy image and made a boot floppy. With both the floppy and Puppy CD in the CDROM I started it up. The floppy boots and starts looking for linux on all drives. after checking everywhere it finds it on the CDROM and announces that it is loading the linux kernel. After a bit of action on the screen it shuts down and begins the whole process again. It keeps recycling until I manually hit the reset button and remove the discs.

Any thoughts?

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Flash
Official Dog Handler
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#5 Post by Flash »

Rich wrote:Does the CD drive boot any other disks?

I had a CD drive a while back that worked fine ( or appeared to ) , but it just wouldn't bootload. Replaced it and the new one worked fine.


Rich

BHSPitMonkey
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Joined: Thu 30 Jun 2005, 05:14

#6 Post by BHSPitMonkey »

i have the same problem on a crappy little thrown-together machine i made for my brother, it has 64mb ram and a pentium 233mHz, no HDD.

I boot from the puppy floppy, it gets to where it says it's loading the kernel from the cd and it starts copying it to the ramdisk from the cd, then after about 10 seconds the system restarts.

I think the drive is too old to boot from, it was made in july 2000, the system just passes over it at boot, despite CDROM being #1 in the boot sequence.

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danleff
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#7 Post by danleff »

Two issues. older cdrom drives do not like home burned cd disks, especially cdrw disks. There is some sort of mode incompatibility with the older drives. I don't know if it can be corrected by setting a different burn mode when burning the disk, as I have not looked much into it. Laptop cdrom drives seem especially a problem. My Thinkpad would not boot off a cdrom disk (home made) and I replaced it with another one I had. No problem! Funny thing is, the one that worked was 20x rated, where the failed one was 24x.

The other problem is RAM. Thinkpads oftem share some ram, usually 4-8 mb for video. So, you actually have a little less RAM available that can be used to handle Puppy being loaded into RAM.
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

dogberry
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Joined: Tue 28 Jun 2005, 12:30

Success!

#8 Post by dogberry »

First of all thanks for all the replies. Considering that my old CDROM was probably the problem, I went back and burned another cd of Puppy 1.03 and made sure that I checked "finalize CD" in Nero when I was burning the iso image. Previously I had left it unfinalized with the idea that puppy could save changes back to the CD on a machine with a cd writer. I figured that maybe the CD not being finalized was keeping my old CDROM from being happy.

Well I put the new "finalized" CD in the drive and started it up. Still no go.

One more try, this time with the "boot2pup" floppy in the FD. This time upon booting to the floppy and finding linux on the CD it booted right up into Puppy. Very satisfying!

Thanks again, Dogberry

Rich
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 19:00
Location: Middlesbrough - UK

#9 Post by Rich »

Result !

A little bit of house training does wonders for a Puppy.

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ezeze5000
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old CD rom boot problem

#10 Post by ezeze5000 »

Sometimes you can do a firmware update on the CD rom drive.

I go to the manufacture's website and look for the updates.

It's worth a try.

I hope this helps :)

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