Getting Puppy onto an OLD Dell laptop.

Booting, installing, newbie
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Mercedes350se
Posts: 790
Joined: Wed 16 Apr 2008, 11:28

#41 Post by Mercedes350se »

Just a thought.

Have you checked, or altered, the boot order in the BIOS so that the CDROM drive is the first boot device and the hard drive is the second?

Edit: Once you do this it will not matter if the CDROM is left as the first boot device.

starhawk
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Joined: Mon 22 Nov 2010, 06:04
Location: Everybody knows this is nowhere...

#42 Post by starhawk »

A couple points...

@Mercedes350se: this system is incapable of booting from CD-ROM. There will be no option present to do that within the BIOS, simply because the programming within such to make it happen does not exist.

@BJF: you keep talking about Win98 floppies vs. other floppies. I suspect if you put a Win98 floppy in the drive you will find it also not to work.

There are two overarching kinds of floppy drives: those in PCs, and those not in PCs. If you were trying to read a PC 5.25" floppy in a Commodore 1541 disk drive, it will not work because of the low-level encoding of the drive. The way the information is placed on the disk is different between those two. I spent my last semester in college programming assembly on a C64 with two of those drives. It was painful and I didn't learn anything terribly useful (except: assembly code is a pain in the ... ) but it was enjoyable in between frustrations.

However... PC floppy drives are generally fungible within their size category. That is, any 3.5" floppy drive will be able to read any 3.5" floppy disk, given the proper software on the OS end. Therefore, your normally-formatted DOS boot floppy, or Plop boot floppy, or any other bootable floppy, will read and boot if the disk and drive are both functional.

That gives either of two possibilities: one is that your BIOS is hosed. Possible but I would say unlikely. If the system boots and operates normally from the hard drive, then you do not have a bad BIOS -- that little chip controls a lot more than the clock! In fact, BIOS stands for Basic Input / Output System and tells the rest of the computer how to access drives and controllers and such, so that you can have these things work and work well. If your BIOS is toast, it wouldn't boot to Win98 in the first place. (At this point, if it IS toast and the machine doesn't boot anything -- recycle the system, there's not much else to be done, as the BIOS must be updated from the [obviously non-working] floppy drive.)

The other possibility, of course, is that the floppy drive itself is no longer operable. That is far more likely. It is of course a mechanical device, and laptops and notebooks lead rough and tumble lives. So it is likely to have lost its calibration at least, if not fallen entirely to bits inside.

Unfortunately, it is likely to be a 'slim' model that is entirely proprietary (in interface, not operation) to your system, as opposed to simply plunking a desktop drive into something more portable. You would at this point, assuming you want it to work, be looking on eBay for an inexpensive but functional machine for parts, and then you would be looking to learn laptop disassembly -- which tends to have quite the learning curve, especially on older models! (This would definitely be the advanced course.)

My suggestion of pulling the hard drive stands. Forget the floppy drive, you're almost certainly wasting time.

BJF
Posts: 262
Joined: Tue 25 Mar 2008, 02:23
Location: Lower Hutt, New Zealand

#43 Post by BJF »

Stahawk: Thank you. Guess I knew your conclusions from early on but the different appearance of the HDD made that course look unlikely. The fear of bricking the lappy sent me off in big circles!
OK. Removed drive and separated it from its caddy. Now it looks just like the Compaq drive here in my right hand once its adapter plug is removed too. It's an IDE drive all right. What's with all these adaptors??? I've put the Compaq back together because it's needed but the Dell drive will go into the Compaq and get PupnGo applied. Report follows.
Somewhere I have a floppy lens cleaner in my bag of old useful things. Hope against hope, I'll give the flop a shampoo one day and see what happens.

Thanks again.

starhawk
Posts: 4906
Joined: Mon 22 Nov 2010, 06:04
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#44 Post by starhawk »

Floppy drives are magnetic... by "lens" I hope you mean "head", otherwise what you have is a shiny disc with brushes on the bottom, which is very good for scratching the lenses of optical drives.

The adapter is a cheap way to fool gullible and/or non-tech people into thinking that the laptop manufacturer is the only company on Earth who can replace their drive for them. It doesn't work very well ;)

...once more I'll remind you that the flexible PCB in that adapter is quite fragile and cannot be repaired once damaged. One hairline cut in one wire counts as "damaged" BTW. Handle that thing with kiddie gloves!

Good luck! Keep us posted.

Dewbie

#45 Post by Dewbie »

BJF wrote:
Somewhere I have a floppy lens cleaner in my bag of old useful things. Hope against hope, I'll give the flop a shampoo one day and see what happens.

Try cleaning the heads with a Q-Tip saturated with isopropyl alcohol.
Then use another Q-Tip to dry them.
And don't energize the drive until it's completely dry.

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